During the four days last week between the two House votes on the Financial Rescue package the flood of interest group generated, form letter, constituent e-mails caused the House IT department to limit them in order to prevent a server crash. (Read The Hill for the full story). This highlights, yet again, the need to augment the email Congress strategy with web-based grassroots to avoid this in the future.

This strategy and battle with Congress has gone on for the last several years ever since the anthrax attack made mailing Congress impossible. Jeffrey Birnbaum of the Post has covered the debate for the last couple of years:

Finding Fault with Logic of Congress’s E-mail Plan

Study Finds Missed Messages on Capitol Hill

Fixing Congress’s Email Woes

Everyone who has ever mounted an advocacy campaign knows the strategy no longer works as a substantive grassroots ploy. Yes, showing a volume of e-mails is a metric for Members of Congress and more importantly interest group stakeholders like Boards who staff can impress by saying they ginned up “thousands” of emails. Congressional staff, however, simply doesn’t weigh interest group mass emails like they formerly did letters. And, the value of citizens communicating with Congress is greatly diminished by this development.

Even more troubling is the increased cost and disruption of the emails on the Congressional IT infrastructure. While some may argue that crashing the House servers is somehow a good thing in a grassroots effort, to me it is no different than throwing rocks at the Capitol or spraying graffiti on its walls – sure they’ll take notice but it is destructive and requires time and more importantly tax payer money to repair – not to mention the fact the Members will not receive more emails if the servers are down. Many Members’ sites went down last week due to the deluge, which doesn’t help the democratic process.

Nor do I believe we should demand that Congress should invest more tax payer money in facilitating this Kabuki dance of emails when we now live in a web-based world where messages can be compiled on third party sites in a quantitative and qualitative manner. It is far simpler and fairer to shift the burden of IT support and infrastructure to the groups who want to be heard.

We’ve developed a system called Isupport.tv that drives constituents to a hosted solution on a coalition or interest group site, compiles votes of support, comments and video messages and builds a database of supporters by zip code. Groups can then send one email to a Member of Congress with a report and link to their site to see feedback -- or it can be brought up in meetings or phone calls. Staff and Members receive both anecdotal feedback and can be impressed with volume when they see thousands voted in support.

This is just one idea and I know there are others out there like using social networking sites like Facebook. There interest groups or just like minded self created groups can again gin up support in numbers – “we have 100,000 friends in support!” – and comments with wall-postings -- and one link can be sent to an office.

What we need is creativity and a change in philosophy and tactics by both grassroots operatives and Members of Congress with transparency as the goal – not server crashes due to spam.