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Cloud-based software platform aligned with the future of citizen engagement

Washington, DC, May 11, 2020 – iConstituent’s GovText platform (GovText.us) is the future of constituent engagement.  While COVID-19 brought the trend of one-on-one engagement via electronic communication to the forefront, this was only the latest progression of a larger communication shift.  Citizens are highly engaged but are less likely to respond to traditional messaging platforms, such as TV, Radio, and Townhalls.  Citizens have come to rely on electronic communication, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Whatsapp to organize grassroots movements.  As an example, during the nomination debate over the Secretary of Education, one congressional leader office tracked 1.3 million attempted calls to their main number, in one day.  In contrast, a typical congressional town hall has less than 50 constituents attending. Electronic communication, such as GovText, is the most effective method for officials to engaging with their constituents, because they can reach out broadly, yet have one-on-one communications with every respondent.

This communication trend is only going to accelerate as Gen Z and Millennials graduate into voters.  These generations are used to communicating most often electronically and have come to expect always-on availability from businesses, government, and their peers.   Engaged citizens have demonstrated their preference for frequent digital communication, versus traditional in-person town halls, which are infrequent, difficult, and costly.  They are going to expect that officials continue to engage on a daily basis via electronic platforms, such as GovText.

“Elected officials need a way to engage with their constituents, and GovText offers a way to communicate both quickly and effectively.  By using a platform where each communication helps develop the big picture, officials can enhance their engagement despite social distancing” said iConstituent’s VP of Sales, Michael Cohen.

GovText is a critical tool for public officials to rapidly engage with their constituents on a one-on-one basis.  Given the diverse demographics of the United States, GovText is ideal for providing pin-point communication with at-risk populations, prioritizing issues, and allowing for critical alerts to be quickly broadcast to the affected population.

With 18 years of experience in citizen engagement, iConstituent provides modern tools for public officials to easily and effectively communicate with their constituents. The company has a complete portfolio of methods for local governments to engage citizens over their key issues. iConstituent is used on a daily basis by Federal, State, and Local governments to map issues, identify concerns, and prioritize their resolution.

Contact:
Maria Ochoa, Investor Relations
PR@iconstituent.com

From programs that track public sentiment trends across time to streamlining town hall invitations, the expansion of iConstituent’s services to federal and state executive leadership is a hallmark of the company’s client base growth, according to CEO and co-founder Zain Khan.

iConstituent’s data tracking products allow a Congressional staff, or a state executive’s staff, to track trends in voter sentiment across time. The use of integrated heat mapping, which uses color (rather than height or width as in bar graphs) to visualize trends and comparisons, provides a common reference point for staff to come together and use such data to predict upcoming political battles, form strategic narratives, and check their assumptions against the reality of aggregate data on constituent sentiment.

The use of visual communication is not new for iConstituent. Maps have played a unique and interesting role in the company’s CRM product navigation, with the platform’s dashboard displaying a map that connects the top tags of the week to the geographical location they came from—a similarly accessible visual representation of trends and geography.

The company has also announced new text messaging functionality for inviting constituents to upcoming town halls and other functions. Recent news stories of lawmakers “ditching” town halls has caused concern that these important meetings may be in decline, a bad sign for democracy.

“We think town halls are important for members of Congress to attend, but you know, we generally always think constituent communication is a good idea,” said Aaron Stowers, Client Success Manager. “We’re happy to make it easier.”

Helping staff where help is needed most: The company’s clients now include the lieutenant governors of two of the country’s most populated states, and a growing number of federal clients. Incoming constituent communication can be overwhelming, and must be handled quickly, often with scant staff resources.

One of the biggest challenges for both federal lawmakers and state government offices is caps on staff—sometimes fiscal, sometimes statutory. Staff limits, whether by federal law applying to federal positions, or the laws of particular states, can tempt chiefs-of-staff to deprioritize constituent communication. Budgetary limits can have a similar consequence. So iConstituent services can help even two or three staffers handle large amounts of incoming communications quickly. Similarly, iConstituent speeds up communication with local agencies like the DMV, social services, DOT, and more. iConstituent also emphasizes helping staff move off of shared email inboxes. Those shared accounts can create inconsistency issues in cases of staff leave or turnover. The company’s products similarly consolidate otherwise disjointed forms of tracking (think of miles of different spreadsheets). If done right, the end result can be quicker response times, quicker data retrieval, and more efficient use of precious work time.

“Experienced staffers will tell you that slow communication slows everything else down,” says Khan. “We help speed things up.”

iConstituent was founded founded in 2002 to help public officials communicate with their constituents. The company’s expanded services for federal and state government offices and elected officials are part of an overall expansion in its profile of service reaching tens of millions of constituents across the country, said Michael Cohen, VP, Sales and Product Strategy.

The current political crisis in Britain stems from a combination of causes, but surely the role of social media in British politics is an exacerbating, if not primary factor.

The 2016 Demos study on the role of digital politics in the United Kingdom found that half of adult British social media users actually used social media for political activity during the previous general election — and, in fact, more people used social media for direct political purposes than those who did equivalent political engagement offline. Almost three-fourths of people surveyed who had gone the digital route politically reported feeling “more politically engaged, in one way or another, as a direct result.” But that engagement was accompanied by something a little more nuanced: those who used social media for political activity reported being more likely to “act on their political convictions” as a result of social media engagement. This included voting, but it may also have included all kinds of political engagement. Between 2015 and now, some parties had a steep learning curve, but now they’re on board — even training their engagement specialists to ignore online trolls.

According to The Guardian: “Political parties nationally spent about £1.3m on Facebook during the 2015 general election campaign; two years later the figure soared to £3.2m.” Now basically unregulated (although that could change), platforms are the new UK political debate stage, used to target voters with both specificities of profiles and generality of aggregate data. Instead of campaigners going to people personally, speaking to them, listening to and transcribing their viewpoints, social media offers, in mass data form, aggregate profiles of people who will vote. The next step is often to target ads, en masse and not very critically, “pounding” voters with non-nuanced, non-dialogical messaging to influence their views. Elected officials and candidates can’t realistically opt-out of such methods. You have stories like that of Ian Lucas, a Member of Parliament from Wrexham, who reports that he feels trapped: “I have to use Facebook in my job to communicate,” Lucas told the BBC… “If I don’t, I know that I will not be competitive as a candidate.

What all of this collectively forms is a picture where political candidates, and officials running for reelection, are “trapped” into using a method that reaches more voters and often reinforces their political commitments via social affirmation — but that risks discouraging face-to-face communication and privileges politically provocative ideas over interpersonal dialogue.

Social media can be a powerful tool of personal, dialogue-oriented campaigning, but that outcome is far from inevitable. It takes time, and staff, to turn FB likes and comments into invitations for activists to get more involved in the political process. It’s basic economics (almost) that encourages advertising geared toward very general (and thus distorted) messaging. In a context such as Brexit, where British society is already very fragmented and often confused, that appeal to the lowest common denominator may become the predominant political method, and UK voters will continue to sacrifice critical dialogue about their relationship with the EU in return for simple, and ultimately ineffective, answers.

Constituent services have been providing various communication features via SMS for some time. The question being asked now is what a system of individual constituent access to quick communication with government offices would look like.

It would look pretty good! Here’s a roundup of texting and SMS as tools of good government-constituent communication—as well as an accountability and transparency check.

The turn to SMS results from demands all over the world, not just the United States. The online discussion site New Tactics reported some time ago that Kenya and other countries were fielding demands for reliable government news and information sources. SMS can “transmit vote tallies to prevent tampering, track the budget, make the Parliament and Legislative Information System more accessible to citizens,” and monitor referenda and elections. Although anti-corruption and other transparency web sites (such as India’s IPaidaBribe.com) have facilitated the exposure of corruption, SMS allows quicker, more convenient, multi-user/diverse platform communication—more like a conversation than a message board.

SMS messaging is also more likely to be non-monetized, since it’s tied to existing messaging platforms. Non-monetization is another key value of government-constituent transparency. Recently, Arkansas Representative Rick Crawford “announced the formal launch of his new text messaging platform” establishing a direct link between the elected official, their office, and their constituents—everyone in the district. “This system has been adopted by Crawford’s office after the recent news about Facebook’s abuse of personal data and possible manipulation of those who use the platform to engage with constituents,” which Crawford wisely interpreted as a problem of monetization—with the rather uncontroversial understanding that, whatever its other virtues, the profit motive probably shouldn’t govern communication between elected leaders and the people.

This same value is reflected in the other virtue of SMS—that it can more easily be used for communication, not propaganda. The individual, person-to-person nature of the communication actually makes propagandizing inefficient. People can tell when the message they’re receiving is a boilerplate, and they’re likely to be using an SMS interface to get specific questions answered, or weigh in on an issue. iConstituent keeps all those constituent communications in one place in a CRM designed specifically for government.

The shortage of good media for direct constituent communication impacts vulnerable and marginalized communities more than privileged ones, as “local governments can be ignorant about constituents’ changing needs and interests – especially marginalized communities that have been historically ignored or under-represented. Local governments may produce services that they find interesting or please national politicians without any feedback from the people they are expected to serve.” But “targeted two-way communication between local governments and their citizenry” is shockingly easy to implement through text messaging. Essentially, people just need a phone number, and the government offices need interface technology to field the