Apparently they do.
Just last week the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) released the results of a recent study they completed on the impact of social media efforts in advocacy campaigns. (As an aside, the member/public engagement nerd in me LOVES CMF studies on how congressional staff view constituent communications).
So here’s what valuable in the recent study. It found that it takes 30 or fewer social media posts to a Member of Congress on a given issue for legislative staff to take notice. This is big news.
Let me give you an example of why this is significant. A few years ago a client, a large trade association, was trying to persuade a powerful committee chair to allow a bill to be voted on in his committee. In an attempt to persuade him to allow the vote, over 1,000 members of the trade group mobilized to call his office to ask for the hearing. A few days later members of the organization were asked to request the vote using Twitter™ and to include the legislator’s “handle” (his identify in Twitterverse). At the time, about 200 members were using what was then a relatively new social media platform and were willing to post. Those 200 Tweets in a fairly short period of time (less than 24 hours), REALLY got his attention and resulted in an immediate phone call from the legislator’s Chief of Staff to the chief lobbyist of the trade group. Notice that 200 messages TRUMPED the more than 1,000 phone calls! And it turns out, 30 of these posts may have done the job. Who knew?
Another interesting thing about the CMF study is that it only takes 30 posts even though an office can’t easily identify if the communication is from a constituent. Typically, offices will only respond to letters, emails or calls from people who live in their districts and people like me work hard to ensure that those letters, emails and calls go to the correct legislator. And along comes this new vehicle for getting messages to legislators that takes a lot more work to trace back to a constituent and it’s still MORE effective than traditional techniques.
I know you are all dying to the read the study now, so here’s a link: CMF Study on Social Networking and Congress