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Hello to all of you,

Contact.ie here, we are asking you to please take the time to read this e-mail as we believe it will help you to understand what we are trying to do with Contact.ie and also give you all some tips on how to more easily cope with mass e-mail campaigns from Irish voters.

What is Contact.ie:

First of all, don't worry we are not Anonymous - it is not our intention to shut down or otherwise interfere with the operation of the IT system in the Oireachtas. In fact, the healthier your system is, the happier we are. For this reason our site's mailing system is set up so that it cannot forward attachments or photos - you will only ever receive text-based emails from us (no viruses, ever).

Our website is designed to encourage members of the Irish public to interact directly with their political representatives. We believe that political change happens in two ways - the first is the obvious one: TOP DOWN change - through elections and legislation created and passed by politicians. The second, and the method Contact.ie is  interested in is BOTTOM UP - that is change provoked and promoted from a grassroots level by citizens in the state. Contact.ie exists to encourage and facilitate this second type of political change.

If you give the matter some thought you will realise that what we are doing can support initiatives from within the political system that seek to improve the functioning of our democracy. It can provide you with a time-efficient method of taking the temperature of Irish citizens and people who live here on current issues and more importantly it can put you directly in touch with a large number of voters in this country without expensive and very limited clientelism-type clinics. At present Contact.ie is run on an entirely voluntary basis and is neither a profit making nor charitable organisation (in fact we are broke! - feel free to give us a donation here: contact.ie/donate). 

What can people do on the site?

On our website people can easily contact the whole community of Irish political representatives by e- mail. They currently have the facility to either compose and address a mail of their own, to any or all of you, or to send one that we have fact-checked and pre-drafted on issues which we consider to be of national importance.  On every mail that is sent from Contact.ie the sender has the opportunity to provide their name and address if they choose and to edit or add to the message we have scripted. We neither have nor want any control over what people choose to add to our mails nor are we responsible for that in anyway.

Why are we now writing to you?

From our experience to date there is a huge disparity in the ways in which different political parties and independent representatives are responding, with some of you seeming to be perfectly adept at dealing with the communications and some others clearly finding it problematic. The sections below include some explanations and tips to help all of you to make the best use of Contact.ie we hope you read it and that it helps.

Why do the contact.ie mails go to all politicians rather than only to the constituency reps or the minister with responsibility for the particular issue?

The users of Contact.ie are already presented with a clearly visible user-friendly option of selecting only their own constituency politicians or they can choose, for example, only to contact Senators or only MEPs. They also have the most used option of contacting all elected representatives in one go.

A word of explanation concerning why we will be maintaining this 'contact all politicians' option: we are interested in democracy and in having as many citizens as possible taking part in the democratic processes. We don't see democracy as either beginning or ending with a vote once every five years and we are sure that as elected representatives you would all agree with us. Furthermore we are of the opinion that with the internet as a means of communication we can act in a small way to balance out the prevalence of clientelism and or parochialism that plagues Irish politics; it seems that our users agree as they tend unfailingly, when national issues are concerned, to choose the "contact all politicians" option.

How can or should you respond? Some Tips

Note that not everyone who contacts you will expect a direct personal reply. What they will expect is that as elected representatives you would be aware of their views on that particular issue. In order to let them know you are aware some of the following are options:

According to the quantity of mails received on any issue you may wish to respond by:

(A) Post your response on Contact.ie. Simply sign up for an account and then create a "article" for your response. Doing this, we will also post your response on our social media outlets and on our mailing list.

(B) In the media. If you are engaging with that issue; statements such as ''having received over xxxxx amount of e-mails from citizens I am aware of the level of concern about x issue '

(C)   If you are a social media user you could also acknowledge the correspondence on twitter or on your facebook. On Facebook, if you tag Contact.ie in your response we will share it on our own networks thereby drawing it to the attention of our users.

(D)   If it is an area of your direct responsibility or if you are personally asked a direct question by a user you should deal with the e-mail in whatever way you would respond to a non-Contact.ie communication.

(E) Immediately remedying the issue raised :-) which would surely be accepted as an adequate response. (For example, if you don't want thousands of emails against paying unsecured bondholders, then don't pay bondholders.)

Some warnings:

1.       Use the 'BCC' option if you are replying to large groups of people in one mail. This means that those you contact are not furnished with the each other's e-mail addresses. This may seem very basic but several of you have already made this mistake and there could be repercussions in terms complaints from citizens about their privacy (not from us! from the constituents who contacted you).

2.        Anything you write in your responses to anyone may become public: for those of you less familiar with the scope of the internet, people you write to will be able to share your responses on social networks, in public and in the media - be aware of this.

Some help with managing your in-box:

Most e-mail providers now have options whereby you can direct mails from a particular source to a dedicated folder - we recommend that you do this for Contact.ie e-mails if you are finding the amount of them a problem. You can then allow time - say once a week - to check these mails, see what issues are being raised and by how many people and to decide how you wish to respond to them (see above). If this is not something you are familiar with your IT department will be able to sort it out very easily for you.

Depending on how much Contact.ie grows in the future (and it is growing quite rapidly at the moment), you may wish to take this one step further and set aside some time weekly or monthly to compose one mail that details your responses and intended actions on all of the issues raised by Contact.ie e-mails and to circulate that (using the BCC option) to all of those who contacted you that week/month. This should be a matter of about ten minutes work.

As some of you have already done you might wish to delegate a particular member of your party to respond to a particular issue and you might then request that they commence their e-mail by explaining that they are responding on behalf of all of their party colleagues.

Some suggestions for how you might make the most of the opportunities these communications provide:

1.       If you have a mailing list use all of your responses to ask those who contacted you if they wish to be signed up - this will allow you to communicate your messages to them directly.

2.       If you are active on the issue that you have been contacted on you may wish to seek the support of those who mailed you for any actions or activities you are taking to address the issue.

3.       If, as has frequently happened, you are contacted by a large body of people on an issue you are supportive of you can use this as a lever or to bolster your argument in whichever of the houses you are active. If necessary and useful Contact.ie can supply you with the numbers of e-mails sent by citizens on that issue - just give us a shout.

Pep Talk:

And because we always like to finish on something slightly motivational here's a little lecture for you.

Barak Obama's presidential election campaign was hugely effective and at least part of that success in gathering such a huge and diverse network of supporters was due to a combination of the very old form of campaigning that is called community organising - that is direct phone calls, door knocking and asking every supporter to recruit more supporters; the second part of this two-handed campaigning combination was that his team created an exact replica of community organising online. They did this by never wasting a contact from the public and by building networks of supporters, fundraisers, and message sharers throughout the system of social media. We encourage all of you to, rather than complaining about these mass e-mail campaigns, now accept that in one form or another they will exist from now on and that the appropriate response is for you to seek to adapt, create systems to deal with them, and most importantly to recognise that they contain the views of the people you were elected to serve and should be valued, listened to, and acted upon.

If any of you have any questions or queries give us a shout and we'll be happy to try to answer the.

Regards,
Mark Conroy & Sarah Clancy