How It Works

Connecting to Congress is a research initiative with almost two decades of experience facilitating and studying online Deliberative Town Halls. Deliberative Town Halls are an evidence-based, established method of re-establishing trust between citizens and their elected officials. The IDEA team has developed Deliberative Town Hall as a turn-key process for participating congressional offices, requiring minimal staff time and effort: our research team handles recruitment, technology, facilitation of the town halls, administering surveys and data analysis. There is also no financial cost to participating offices.

Once a Member (or bipartisan pair of Members on a committee) decides to participate, the research team coordinates with staff on key high-level decisions, but then handles all execution independently, to reduce the demands on staff.

1. The research team coordinates with the office to schedule their online Deliberative Town Hall and select the topic that the session will focus on.
2. The research team recruits a representative sample of constituents to attend the session using a variety of recruitment strategies (discussed with and approved by participating offices) and administers a pre-survey with questions about constituents’ opinion of Member/committee, issue, and potential policy actions. The team also provides participating constituents with non-partisan briefing materials scaled to a 9th grade reading level on the topic before the online town hall. (Participating offices review and approve these materials.)
3. On the day of the session, the Connecting to Congress team assists the Member’s office in getting set up and handles all technology. The one-hour session itself is streamed live to constituents who submit their questions and comments to research team members. The Connecting to Congress research teams screens questions for representativeness and deliberative quality, then relays high-quality questions verbally to the Member for response. Only on-topic questions are passed on to the Member, and format of the event has been shown to prompt high-quality questions.
4. The research team administers a post-survey to constituents who participate, and then conducts analysis showing the impact of the Deliberative Town Hall on constituents’ opinions before and after the event.
5. The research team provides the office with an in-depth report that analyzes the session as well as survey data from participating constituents taken before and after the session.
6. Our research team asks staff in participating offices to complete a brief interview to evaluate impact and inform the development of best practices,