Legislative Mail Best Practices

Effectively managing constituent mail is one of the biggest challenges every congressional office faces. Operating successfully as a representative involves establishing an effective dialogue with your district. Constituents share their views and ask questions, while Members do the best they can to listen and explain their own positions.

Over time, individual emails, massive advocacy campaigns and good old fashioned snail mail all add up. One of the biggest factors in successfully managing the volume is having the most advanced, time-saving CRM at your fingertips. The cutting-edge tools provided by Fireside are the most effective, and with a strategic plan behind their implementation, they will help any office elevate its mail program and provide top-shelf constituent service to the public.

What is legislative mail? Legislative mail is correspondence from constituents that focus on legislative activities instead of requests for help with services.

What is a form letter? Form letters are pre-written, pre-approved letters that have been created to respond to frequent constituent correspondence about particular legislative issues.

Define the Logging Process

While some constituents will call the DC office or even walk into a district office, the majority of constituent communication is going to come through your inbox. Given the volume of individual correspondence and advocacy campaign emails, you’re going to want a clearly defined process to make the system run smoothly.

• Accepting Mail - One of the first questions you should be thinking about is: “From whom should we accept mail?” By default, you will receive mail from people who live in your district (as defined by Congress), but if you would like to accept mail from outside the district, you can certainly elect to do so.
  
  
  

• Special Cases - You will also need to define the best way to address special cases like VIPs and ‘frequent flyers’ (people who correspond with the office at a rate higher than the majority). Should you handle these pieces of correspondence in a different way? The same could be asked of personalized campaign emails. While most emails in an advocacy campaign will be a standard form letter, occasionally constituents will personalize the emails, making it akin to individual correspondence. How should your team handle these messages?

Form Letter Approval

The efficiency of your form letter approval process will make or break your office's ability to meet your turnaround goals. Having too many people in the process will slow it down, holding up mail from going out in a timely manner. Not having the right people involved in the process can be similarly problematic, especially when the subject matter experts are excluded. To actually go through the process of approving form letters is a breeze with Fireside - you can do it all within the platform and avoid downloading, attaching and tracking versions of Word documents shared via email. Developing the process, however, will require some planning.

• Draft New Form Letters - Typically, the Legislative Correspondent (LC) or the Legislative Assistant (LA) covering that issue area draft form letters as they are needed.

• Approve New Form Letters - If a form letter originates from the LC, it will likely go next to the LA covering that issue area. From there it will move on to final approval from a Legislative Director (LD) or the Chief of Staff. We strongly recommend that the Member of Congress NOT be involved in the mail approval process. While that may seem counterintuitive, the fact is that Members are incredibly busy all day, running between meetings, votes and other obligations. Members simply don’t have the time to approve form letters while adhering to the office’s (two week recommended) mail deadline.

• Review and Send Emails & Letters - Once a form letter is approved, it should be sent back to the LC to let them know the form letter is now ready to be used. The LC will attach the approved form letter to all relevant correspondence that has been grouped together in a batch. Once the approved form letter is attached to each mail record, the LC can go ahead and send out email correspondence and print out physical letters to bring the mail process to completion - at least for that issue.

Constituent Response Tracks

While nearly every piece of correspondence you receive will be sent a response, the individual mail journeys are not always the same. There are three distinct tracks that constituent mail might travel on between the time of receipt and a response being sent back to the constituent.

• New Issue Track - Any time correspondence arrives in your email inbox for which you do not already have an approved form letter, that mail goes into the “New Issue Track.” The new issue requires the staff to draft a new form letter, go through the approval process, and then respond back to the constituent at the end.

• Fast Track - Correspondence for which you do have an approved form letter is said to be on the “Fast Track.” Once the mail is logged, the appropriate form letter can be immediately applied and the response sent out to the constituent that same day.

• Personalized Response Track - When constituents correspond about very specific, “one-off” type issues or personalize a legislative campaign email to make it more unique, many offices prefer to send them a customized response as opposed to a form letter. These individual pieces of mail are typically assigned to a specific staff member, who might then customize an existing form letter to better address the constituent’s issue or even create a response from scratch. Once drafted, this message usually goes through an abbreviated approval process before the LC sends the response.