by Karl Kurtz
Many legislators express frustration about the large volume of e-mail messages they receive. They talk about it at NCSL meetings and share methods of managing the flood of electronic mail. Most of them understandably place the highest priority on responding to their own constituents and the lowest on answering e-mail lobbying campaigns from elsewhere in (or outside) the state. Many of them use automated responses as an e-mail management tool.
I recently had an opportunity to assess how well legislators are doing with these automated messages. Yesterday I sent out an online survey about the powers of legislative leaders to 5,200 state legislators. Normally, we don't send electronic surveys to legislators because we get very low response rates, in part because of the difficulty of penetrating the screening and blocking mechanisms for unsolicited e-mail. But in the case of this survey, we only needed to get a few hundred responses (a handful for each chamber) and didn't need a high response rate.
I received more than 325 automated responses (about 6%) to the survey. A few of these were standard "out of office" replies that many of us use when we are not available to respond to e-mails, but most of them were tailored to legislators' purposes of coping with a large volume of messages. I read most of these automated responses to see how I would react if I were a constituent trying to communicate my needs or views to my legislator.
My impression was that the great majority of these automated messages are well done. They are friendly and polite and provide assurance that the legislator wants to hear from constituents and is listening. Most of them explained the problem of the volume of e-mail. Many of them urged patience in allowing time for the legislator or a staff person to get back to them. A number of them asked me to make sure that I provided my address or redirected senders to a web page where I could use a form that requires contact information. If I received such a message from my legislator, I might be a little irritated at having to take an extra step, but I wouldn't be completely put off.
But not all of them were skillfully done:
- A few contained spelling errors or awkward phrases ("I am in receipt of your message...").
- One said, "My policy is not to respond to e-mail messages, but I do read all of them for information purposes." Others said that they would prefer if constituents called them (or their office) to express their viewpoints. Shouldn't constituents be able to use their favored means of communication, not the legislator's?
- Some of the legislators who have their own staff had maladroit messages like, "I won't be able to respond to your message myself, but one of my staff will get back to you" or, perhaps worse, the automated message came from a staff person, not the legislator, in the first place. Staff may in fact be the ones who respond, but there are more graceful ways to explain this to constituents. Announcing in advance that staff will respond seems gratuitous at best and patronizing at worst.
- In one state several responses said, "The legislature is not currently in session. This mailbox has been discontinued until the next legislative session." To be fair to the legislators, this is probably an institutional decision on the part of the legislature not to provide legislators with state-supported e-mail service while out of session. But from the standpoint of building public trust with constituents who want to communicate with their legislators it is not a good one.
And here is my favorite sappy, wordy and self-serving automated response--slightly edited so as to protect the guilty:
Thank you for e-writing to the office of State Senator X. Due to the economic challenges being confronted by every sector of our economy, Sen. X has chosen to automate various functions of his capitol office in order to save taxpayer dollars. This decision has resulted in Sen. X being able to return $XX,XXX or 70% of his allocated office account for the last Fiscal Year. But it also means he has fewer staff personnel than authorized.
As a consequence of this decision, certain requests from constituents may take longer to fulfill. With a smaller staff, and due to the Committee assignments of the Senator, e-mails are triaged and then delegated based on pre-determined factors. For instance, e-mails are answered if they come from within the Senate District. Moreover, individualized e-mails take priority over form mail.
Again, we hope you understand the Senator's desire to be responsive all the while being fiscally sensitive to the demands on taxpayers and their respective financial circumstances.
You may want to check out the e-office of Sen. X. There you can find interesting items and other ways to provide input....
In order to assist you more quickly, please be sure to provide your home mailing address and phone number since your inquiry may necessitate a follow-up call for additional information.
Again, thank you for contacting us. Please let us know if we can ever be of additional assistance in the future.
Sincerely,
[A staff person]
Sen. X's office
This legislator would have been better off with a discontinued mailbox.
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