by Jimmy Marks
New House spending bill includes $500k for DM postcards. What happened to high tech communications & being green? - The CU Warrior, via Twitter
What's the opposite of "progress" again?
Oh, right.
Congress is spending money on plenty of things aimed at keeping America afloat, like Frisbee parks (read here). Part of that afloat-y type spending is a direct mail marketing postcard piece to let people know about townhall meetings where they can ask questions of their government (click here for more info).
WHOAH, back up...postcards?!? This is the way we're "gettin' the word out"? And you're going to spend HALF A MILLION DOLLARS DOING THAT?!?! What's worse, you've been touting how you're going to be "greener" and how you want to curb global warming...and you run to paper? Come on...
In researching this story, I came across an old phrase "the dialogue of the deaf". I believe it existed before the creation of a standard sign language, because it refers to the moment when two people are talking to each other and neither is listening to the other. Let's get away from that and start making a real, responsive, constructive dialogue between the people who make the laws and the people who have to live by them.
Look, let's get everyone on the same ledge here. Now's the time. Spend half a million to set up an oft-updated blog, a website, a message board, a call center - anything but some postcard that's going to be lost in the large, unending glut of postal direct mail marketing. Jeez, people, what century is this? Will the postcards be sent by pony? Stagecoach?
Maybe that's me showing off my "techno-dweeb" side, but I think I have a good point. For half a mil, do online TEN TIMES what you can do on a postcard.
Consider:
- Instant feedback on a comment section or a message board
- Group chats over a thing like Skype, where you can even meet people face-to-face
- Instant messenger chats
- Surveys and online voting
- email, if nothing else
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