K Street Cafe

Cross-posted from the Congressional Management Foundation blog

In 1998, the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) embarked on a ground-breaking research project: to study best practices in congressional websites with the goal of providing Congress with guidance on how to use this emerging technology to improve constituents’ communication with, and understanding of, the institution. Three years later the initiative was boosted by a two-year grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts to create the Congress Online Project, in association with The George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management.

The project had an ambitious goal: develop a methodology for evaluating more than 600 congressional personal office, committee and leadership websites. CMF spent a year conducting focus groups with citizens, examining private sector research, and even polling reporters on their expectations when interacting with congressional websites. We then engaged in a thorough assessment process, assigning grades to every website on Capitol Hill. The strategy was: by highlighting the best practices, and playing to politicians’ natural competitiveness with a grading system, Congress would better utilize online communications tools, thereby better serving citizens. (more…)

Adfero Group’s Chris Battle recently wrote an article titled, “Why Washington doesn’t get new media ,” which was published in The Hill.  Check out an excerpt from the piece below, or read the full article here.

When I first started working in Washington, in the ’90s, websites were still a novelty — a bad novelty. The average congressional website was little more than an electronic pamphlet featuring the face of a member of Congress smiling out like a trial attorney airbrushed onto an interstate billboard.
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