CapWiz Plays Rough -- and Wrong -- on Congressional Delivery

Posted by Jason Z.  

01:30 PM Oct 02, 2006

In this morning's Washington Post, Jeffrey Birnbaum's K Street Confidential column (free registration/bugmenot needed) reports the allegation by Capitol Advantage (aka CapWiz) that competing vendors -- including DemocracyInAction, which is dignified specifically with a charge of "fail[ing] miserably" -- are to various degrees not delivering messages to Congress through write-your-rep web pages.

At least as pertains DemocracyInAction, they're talking through their hats.

Here's the short reason, before we get into the weeds: the study's methodology was to assess deliverability by testing different vendors' web forms with constituent messages to members who are known to send replies, and seeing whether the sender in fact received such a reply. On the face of it, not an unreasonable way to do it. But our software has long passed to congressional web forms addresses that pipe replies back to our own network as opposed to the sender's actual e-mail, so that the entire experience is a clean one-and-done for someone clicking a campaign page.

GWU professor Dr. Dennis Johnson, credited with overseeing the study, apparently never thought to question his process before arriving at the most bombastic conclusion possible, which conclusion also just happened to inure to the financial benefit of the sponsoring entity. As of this writing, Capitol Advantage's website baldly displays its false "0% delivery rate" for DemocracyInAction. Now that they know it's wrong, we'll see if they choose to back off it. Update: Credit where due; Capitol Advantage's graphic now reflects this response.  (Incidentally, welcome to folks referred from Capitol Advantage's study -- and thanks to Cap Ad for linking to our critical response.)

But even more than being wrong on the facts, it's wrong on the narrative -- that congressional deliverability problems are caused by bad vendors rather than the intended consequence of a backwards electronic communications regime erected (and vigorously reinforced) by congressional offices.

Some background is in order here, and readers familiar with the whole congressional deliverability terrain can feel free to skip these next two paragraphs.

Capitol Advantage is the granddaddy of messaging Congress online. In fact, its roots as a company are pre-Internet altogether: its printed directories of legislative aides are still used in the Hill. Capitol Advantage recognized, however, that this store of data could open up a whole new revenue stream from advocacy organizations, and the write-your-rep page was born. That tool subsequently met sincere flattery from a host of other companies who have extended the concept by incorporating it into constituent relationship management platforms which use online actions to recruit supporters, database features to manage those supporters, and e-mail blasters to maintain communication with them. DemocracyInAction's software is a species in this genus.

Congress, meanwhile, responded to the explosion in online communications spurred by said model's proliferation not by engineering new ways to manage enormous quantities of inputs but by squeezing off access to keep the flow manageable -- specifically, by withdrawing public e-mail addresses and erecting web forms designed to obstruct organized e-mail campaigns originating from third-party sites. Which brings us to the current counterproductive stalemate in which legislators churn unnecessary changes through web forms in an effort to trip up a couple dozen vendors and independents, who in turn monitor 500+ web forms for these selfsame changes. On the plus side, it generates plenty of employment -- long a strength of the lobbying industry.

(Welcome back to the paragraph-skippers.)

Everyone respects what CapWiz has done, and not least because the Congress.org site it endowed is also a genuine public benefit. But this report grossly overclaims its conclusions, and the fact that registering a zero didn't set off enough alarm bells to ask us about it underscores its role as a marketing hit rather than pursuit of truth.

Perhaps the company's heavy investment in surmounting unnecessary and undemocratic obstacles where others have extended their platforms' feature sets amounts to an investment in the status quo. Implicit in this report is the idea that the decision by elected officials to refuse delivery of citizen communiques is not a public wrong to be righted but a corporate profit center, and at rates that would lock most small organizations completely out of the conversation.

Birnbaum doesn't cite our specific response because it's not a CapWiz vs. DIA issue from the commanding heights (the report looks at 10 different vendors) -- and to his credit, he nails the real problem around which Capitol Advantage circumlocutes. Reflecting on low delivery rates, he recognizes the other party in the transaction:

"That is a big disappointment. After all, aren't public officials supposed to be open to the public?"

... and then proceeds to discuss the implications of the recipients' overall readiness to dismiss e-mail communiques whether they receive them or no.

"That strikes me as the bigger issue: Not whether every e-mail is getting through to Congress but how many of them are being read with serious interest. I bet a closer look at that issue would be even more unsettling to Web site operators and their clients than the latest estimate of delivery rates."

Hear, hear. Birnbaum fleshes out his take a bit more in an online chat currently ongoing as this post goes up.

For anyone interested, the below is the reply we sent Birnbaum last week during his research of the story.

 

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Our software is set to to direct replies back to our own system by passing anonymized e-mail addresses through the web forms, so their methodology would never register hits for us. It's been that way for some time. Had this been a study meant to advance understanding as opposed to a commercial hit piece, they might have easily learned that by asking us. For that matter, it's amazing that seeing two companies come up with zero percent didn't cause them to question their own methodology, and it's breathtakingly cavalier for them to assert on this narrow basis that we "failed miserably in [our] ability to send e-mails to Congress." Were we to level this charge against Capitol Advantage, we'd hear from their attorneys.

The larger issue, as you're aware, is the overall congressional deliverability environment. This study unfortunately distorts a grave issue of democratic participation in and access to the political process through the lens of one company's marketing department. Every one of these vendors and thousands of advocacy organizations using them or going it alone are operating in an environment that's fundamentally shaped by congressional hostility to online advocacy. The CMF report addresses this problem directly -- that it's a deluge of communications, staff size hasn't increased in a quarter-century, and most offices aren't sure what to do. It ends up less like delivering postcards to a mailbox and more like serving a subpoena to a fugitive: the recipient is actively avoiding the message, and is likely to ignore it once it gets there. The whole purpose of web forms is to make it *harder* to write. So Capitol Advantage uses a deeply flawed methodology to prove a deeply flawed point -- that ultimately it's the people trying to reach Congress through the Internet who are at fault for members' decisions to create obstacles to online communications in lieu of developing new ways to handle them.

While we provide a tool for communicating with Capitol Hill, we're a nonprofit organization ourselves -- I believe the only such entity in the survey pool -- and as such, we're concerned about access. Small organizations shouldn't need to spend tens of thousands of dollars to generate organized e-mails to Congress, and people who want to take action shouldn't have to navigate confusing welters of web forms. If Capitol Advantage really shared that concern, they'd be more interested in moving the Hill towards better standards of practice. This report suggests Capitol Advantage thinks systematic dysfunction is not so much bad for democracy as good for sales.

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Capitol Advantage report

Paula — 10:53 AM Oct 05, 2006

Could DIA please explain why it anonymizes the e-mail addresses? That makes no sense to me. I have used CapWiz's system and received substantive responses back via e-mail from Congressional offices (far beyond the autoresponder) and frankly don't want my tax dollars spent on sending me snail mail. If I understand correctly how DIA's system works, it's impossible for an office who does take e-mail communications seriously enough -- and makes the best use of the available technology -- to respond in the most cost-effective and efficient way, which is to respond via e-mail to the constituent, and to add the constituent to the Congressional representative's e-newsletter list. I understand being upset with CapWiz for not accurately gauging your response rate, but how *can* a member of the public objectively evaluate DIA's response rate using this system? And how does sending a randomized anonymous e-mail from a third-party provider do anything but feed the Congressional offices' concern that real people aren't behind these e-mails --instead, they're just being generated on their behalf by third-party providers?

Why rewrite e-mails?

Jason Z — 04:24 PM Oct 05, 2006

Thanks, Paula -- that's a great question. This isn't necessarily something we consider ideal, but there are tradeoffs for almost any delivery choice one makes with Congress.

That said, the main reason is that congressional offices are inconsistent (in this as in all else) in how they handle e-mail addresses and many of them do add people to reps' own mailing lists. For some people, this is a plus; for others, it's not -- and it's not necessarily obvious to a person visiting an activist organization's web site that their taking action on that site will put them on Rick Santorum's mailing list on an ongoing basis. As a tech provider, we're in the position of having to balance interests between at least three other stakeholders (besides ourselves): individual letter-writers, advocacy organizations, and Hill offices. Those consituencies all conflict in terms of their perceived self-interest, so there's literally no way to solve the problem without someone's ox being gored. Still, that was a feature decision we made a couple of years ago, and we're certainly open to reconsidering.

why rewrite e-mails?

Paula — 11:47 AM Oct 06, 2006

I think you should reconsider, especially based upon the results of the Congressional Management Foundation study, which indicates as one of its key findings that "Many congressional staff doubt the legitimacy of identical form communications, and want to know whether communications are sent with constituents’ knowledge and consent."

I don't care if I'm added to Rick Santorum's list -- I can always ignore it or unsubscribe, and these days I pretty much expect to be added to a list if I provide contact information, CAN-SPAM notwithstanding. But I do care if Santorum's office, or anyone else's (especially those that my progressive organization has a much better chance of persuading) disregards my e-mail communication because they think it was made up on my behalf.

When my e-mail address (which consists of my name and my organization's domain) is used, it's much less likely that it appears to be made up than one that is anonymized. (And if they're not sure, they can always e-mail me and test it.) My advocacy organization would never consider becoming a DIA customer until this feature is changed.

A different process altogether is indicated

Turo Dexter — 12:33 PM Oct 06, 2006

Much of the problem is caused by advocacy organizations utilizing a mechanism not designed for them. It is inefficient to simply plug mass-gathered messages into a web form or an email address. Instead, advocacy organizations should work together with congresisonal offices to deliver sorted lists of individuals expressing common concerns, with individual comments included, of course. This is a way advocacy organizations can really add value. In the Kucinich for President 2004 campaign, organizations hooked automated systems up to one of our web forms and created an enormous amount of extra work for us - when what they should have done was to contact us and say, "We have 3,500 constituents who believe such-and-such about an issue. Where would you like us to send the spreadsheet?" This requires buy-in from the congressional offices involved, but when they think about it, they'll realize how much work it's saving them.

User Contact Info

Andy G — 06:55 AM Oct 13, 2006

I have noticed on DIA client sites that a phone number is not requested, even though some legislators require one to be sent. Just like what you do with email addresses, are you falsifying the phone numbers in those instances as well as the emails? Isn't falsifying any user contact data a bad idea? Someone could say "how do we know you are just changing the email address and phone number and not the message content as well?" Seems like the validity of any message sent via your system could be questioned now.