Do we need a break from the chaos? This week we are going to dive deeper on a really interesting phenomenon in the world of constituent engagement: what I’m calling “franchise events.”
Let me frame this by saying that one of my desert-island foods is a McDonald’s McMuffin (not sorry), so when I talk about a Congressional program as operating on a franchise model, that is not derogatory. I actually think the franchise model — where an individual licenses and locally operates a national brand identity, like a McDonald’s — is an interesting lens to think about how Congress and legislatures work.
The biggest cliché about Congress is that it’s not an institution, it’s 541 independent small businesses. That creates a tradeoff: it allows each individual Member the flexibility to decide how they want to run their office to best meet their constituents’ needs, but it also means that there is a lot of duplicative work and resourcing for each office without economies of scale (just think of the Politico Pro subscriptions).
Programs like the Congressional Art Competition or the Congressional App Challenge split the difference: a nonprofit develops an idea for an event, then provides administrative support to individual Congressional offices as they host the event, tailoring the specifics to their own local communities — like a franchise. That’s not to say that there’s no agenda to these organizations and events: as we get into in this week’s conversation, this type of event gets into the subtler, non-lobbying art of putting an issue on the radar for Congress.
I think this opens up some really interesting questions about the constituent experience, and what people can expect from their elected representatives. Should you have the same experience when you reach out to Congress, no matter where you are in the country? As Congress provides more and more direct services (and participation in the App Challenge, insofar as it can support a student’s college application, feels like a service), is there an argument for consistency across Members?
And isn’t it fun that “franchise” can mean “an authorization granted by a company to an individual or group enabling them to carry out specified commercial activities, e.g., acting as an agent for a company's products,” and the right to vote? It’s constituent engagement all the way down.
Without further ado, I’m delighted to share my conversation with Melissa Dargan. Melissa is a superstar in the world of helping Congress work more efficiently to engage constituents — she’s the former Congressional Affairs Director of the Congressional App Challenge, YouTube Creator of the Congre$$ series on personal finance for Congressional staff, and Founder and CEO of TourTrackr (which I hope she’ll come back to discuss at some point).
In this conversation, we cover:
What institutional gears had to fall into place for the Congressional App Challenge to exist
How to build a national event for Congress
Different outreach and engagement needs in the lifecycle of a Congressional office
Building constituent trust through “feel-good” engagement
Anne Meeker: Can you start by telling me what the Congressional App Challenge is?
Melissa Dargan: Yes. So the Congressional App Challenge is a competition that Members host in their districts that promotes STEM education, and in particular computer science, where the students create applications for whatever they want to invent, and then they submit it into the competition of their Member of Congress. The Member of Congress picks a winner, and then ultimately highlights that winning app in the Capitol. So it was basically a way for Members to connect with their constituents and promote computer science education in their districts.
It was born out of House Resolution 77 in 2013, sponsored by Representative Candace Miller, the chair of the Committee on House Administration [CHA] at the time, to promote science, technology, engineering and math.
At the time when it was first launched, it was actually completely run by CHA. After its first year, I think CHA realized that — between the knowledge of computer science and the execution of running a national competition — they wanted to seek help. In the model that they were building it off, the Congressional Art Competition, the House works with a nonprofit organization to help organize and run the competition. So their premise was, okay, well, that works out, so let's find a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that can also help with the Congressional App Challenge and build it out the way that the Art Competition has been built. That’s when they reached out to the Internet Education Foundation to foster basically a public-nonprofit partnership to help them run it.
Anne Meeker: And how did you end up involved in the project?
Melissa Dargan: Initially, when it was just CHA hosting the App Challenge the first year, I was actually still working on the Hill, and I was the staffer in charge of the App Challenge in my office. And the first year, we were actually one of the successful offices who had individuals and students submit, so I understood what it was like to run the competition. When the House decided that they wanted to seek a nonprofit organization to help with it, I ended up running into the director, and she picked my brain. Eventually I got pitched on the idea of joining the Congressional App Challenge as their Congressional Affairs Director to help build it out for them, since I understood how it worked on the House side, had a successful competition in a Member office, and how I could then replicate that for other offices.
Anne Meeker: Like you said, the Congressional Art Competition with the Congressional Institute was the first of these, but it seems like this model has expanded a bit — now there's the App Challenge, [former] Rep Kilmer introduced an idea for a Modernization Essay Competition, the Vietnam Veteran pinning ceremonies, I know other Members have tried to start issue-specific town halls…Do you think that's a replicable model more generally, or was there something specific that made the App Challenge eventually take off?
Melissa Dargan: Well, there are rules and regulations into how and what a Congressional office can do and use official resources for. There had to be a specific change in Rules passed in 2015 to officially sanction competitions. The Art Competition was already ingrained, but in order to expand that, they had to deem the Congressional App Challenge an officially-sanctioned computer science competition that Members could then use their allocated resources to promote in the district.
Once they have officially sanctioned competitions, now that's in the Members’ Handbook, that has allowed an opening to other options. The idea that a Member office can do this kind of outreach, can promote this specific kind of competition — essay writing, idea generation — derives from that. But there had to be a change in the Rules in order to even allow the App Challenge to continue the way it was, and to allow the House to do it in conjunction with a nonprofit organization.
Anne Meeker: You really see how many little, tiny dominoes had to fall for this to happen. And so then when you came on as Congressional Affairs Director, what was involved in that role? What was the day to day?
Melissa Dargan: So my role was educating Members and building awareness of the Congressional App Challenge, because at the time, not very many Members were involved in it. So my biggest job was getting Members to sign up for that app challenge competition for the year when we started in 2015, getting them on board to say that they were going to host one, and getting them excited — but also giving them a game plan to make sure they have successful competition. The first year the House did it, maybe a fourth of the people who hosted it actually had successful competitions. Offices who didn't get submissions were like, “well, nobody's into coding in our district, and we're not as enthused about hosting it again,” because who wants to host something and then it fails? So my biggest thing was education, awareness, and then actually getting them the right resources and toolkit to have successful competitions and have submissions.
Anne Meeker: As you were talking to Members who were just thinking about signing up for the first time, what was the pitch for it?
Melissa Dargan: My pitch was, initially, STEM education and computer science is important. It's the way we’re moving forward, right? That was the general pitch. And then sometimes offices were like, “well, that's not the industry in our district, and we haven't had successful competitions in the past — there's just no demand for this, no appetite for it.” And then I would ask, “well, what is the biggest industry in your district?” And they'll say, like, agriculture or transportation, or just things that they didn't inherently believe were tech driven. And then I would say, “Oh, you mean, like with transportation, the development of self driverless vehicles is a discussion?” At the time in 2015, it wasn't as widespread, but it was still on the horizon. Or like in agriculture, there are advances in technology that are going to be needed. And if you don't look into your district and start to promote, or at least put in effort to raise awareness of STEM and computer science, those students who eventually become interested in it won't stay in your district. They'll go elsewhere. They'll go to Silicon Valley. And you'll need these minds and these tech-savvy students to stay in your district to then promote, like, drone development for agricultural tech. I think that's where there was a light bulb to realize, “oh, technology is entwined with every part of our lives, it isn't just agriculture.”
And then obviously providing the resources — basically, the Congressional App Challenge would give you “here's how to execute your App Challenge, play by play. Here's even a rubric that you could base off your scoring of apps,” whether or not the office took it, revised it, made it their own. We would provide all of that. They just had to be the front face of it and promote it in their districts and get the schools involved — which is still a heavy feat.
Anne Meeker: How was the process of talking to newly-elected Members about this?
Melissa Dargan: It was actually relatively easier. I mean, the new Members, while they have a lot on their plate, they also just have more appetite to do more, and they love the idea of outreach with constituents and a way to engage the student population.
Anne Meeker: So it's kind of the new Members trying to figure out how to structure their engagement, and so this is a ready-made thing to reduce that burden on their staff to figure it out.
Melissa Dargan: Yeah. And it was partly fresh enthusiasm. But it was really members who were engaged in their districts, and ones who knew and understood the importance of technology. With the freshman members, they liked the idea because, again, it was a good way to reach out to constituents that wasn't combative, just based on policy that isn’t a dividing political issue. Like, who's going to object to computer science education and recognizing students for their achievements and work on a national scale?
Anne Meeker: Did you ever get any questions from offices about how to handle picking winners and losers, or any questions or hesitations about elevating some constituents and some students over others?
Melissa Dargan: So the question of winners and losers wasn't necessarily the case. What they wanted to implement was a fair rubric, right? To give everybody a fair shot, and even to provide access to the ability to code. Because if, let's say there was a student who was interested in technology, but their school (in what we found is a majority of schools across the country) didn't have a computer science program — part of the mission of the Congressional App Challenge was to highlight the fact that most of these districts, which are going to need STEM-educated students, don't have the resources in their district to even start to foster that. So it was never the Member or the staffers on the judging panel. They always got external judges to judge, who were qualified, whether they were entrepreneurs, computer science majors, maybe in the local college. And then we also provided an example rubric of how you would grade an app.
Anne Meeker: So based on your experience of working with the Congressional App Challenge, what do you think this tells us about the future of constituent engagement?
Melissa Dargan: Based on this experience, I would say Members finding feel-good ways to connect with their constituents is always in demand. Whether that's tours — because it's like, “Hey, we're gonna give you free tours of Washington, DC when you come!” That's a great constituent engagement and service — or the App Challenge, the Art Competition…again, feel-good.
Sometimes I get asked, “Is there ever a world where tours will just be gone and Members won't ever do this again, and TourTrackr will not be needed?” And I'm like, that would be the day that a Member office doesn't care about their constituents. Because they want to find good ways to connect with their constituents that are a human-to-human interaction, just like these competitions are. In that case, they're interacting with youth, but it's also a good way to engage the community. When they get to do this big event for the community, and all the students come out, ten different schools come out, they make a big deal out of it. When you engage the schools, you've engaged the teachers. You’ve engaged the parents. And there is a good promotion of the message that they're sending, whether that's the importance of art or the importance of computer science — it shows that the Member cares about their community and investing back in kids, especially now when I feel like politics has become so hyper-partisan and divided. Instead of like, “Hey, let me try and like sell all my policies” — and policy is important, and that is the main thing that they come to Washington, DC to do, in addition to constituent services. But when we're looking at the value that the App Challenge creates, it’s like good, positive services, that people will not inherently hate and be mad at you for. It's like a breath of fresh air.
thank you for this delightful break from the chaos! Melissa deserves a superstar Congress cape! The app program is one of my favorite examples of congressional evolution--it is brilliant in how it introduced a modern idea via the DNA and the muscle memory of the institution... and now it is jam packed with enthusiastic young people learning about democracy. Love it!