Why Teletownhalls Aren’t a Cop Out
Teletownhalls, advertising techniques for outreach at scale, and how the tech available to Congress shapes constituent engagement: interview with Ashley Julyan of the AEJ group
BY ANNE MEEKER
I’m always grateful to guests for making the time to join me for Voice/Mail, but Ashley Julyan might take the cake for busiest week: when I caught up with Ashley during the government shutdown, she was in the middle of supporting Democratic Congressional offices on a record-breaking streak of dozens of teletownhalls, with tens of thousands of constituents attending. As we’ve discussed before, crises foster creativity, as well as constraints — as we’re looking at the future of town halls, it’s worth considering how the innovations born from necessity during these high-pressure moments might reshape constituent engagement long after the crisis has passed.
Teletownhalls can get a bad rap as overly-controlled, overly-scripted ways for Members to check the box of constituent engagement while they avoid looking their constituents in the eyes. But as Ashley shares, the tool itself is powerful and neutral: it’s up to the Members and staff to decide how they use it, and up to constituents to reward good behavior.
Ashley Julyan is the founder and Executive Director of the AEJ Group, founded in 2021 to support Congressional offices in using modern outreach tools and strategies to reach constituents. In her previous role as a Capitol Hill sales manager for Leidos, Ashley mastered available tools and services, becoming a one-stop shop for any constituent engagement strategy. In 2020, Leidos selected Ashley for its Top 30 Emerging Leaders program.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity and may differ slightly from the audio recording.
Anne Meeker: Amazing. Okay, actual introduction. Ashley, thank you so much for joining us for Voice/Mail. I have wanted to get the chance to chat with you for this for so long because you have such a unique, absolutely fascinating slice of understanding how Congress, Members of Congress, and constituents communicate at scale, down to the really nitty-gritty of who makes the decision on what email goes out when and what tool gets used. So I’m so excited to talk today. Thank you so much for being here.
Ashley Julyan: Thank you so much for having me. I am so excited. I’m a POPVOX [Foundation] hype girl, so anything I can do, I’ll do my best to try to answer anything I can.
Anne Meeker: Awesome, appreciate that. There’s so much that we can talk about with you, but I want to talk about your group, the AEJ Group, and then what I really want to get into is telephone town halls and how telephone town halls work and where do they fit in the ecosystem. But let’s start on background. How did you get into this very unique role?
Ashley Julyan: Yeah, it is certainly a weird space. I totally understand that. My first day of work on the Hill was voting the day before the 113th Congress. I kind of feel like in Congressional years, it should be dog years — like I’m a hundred million years old. I do have a really funny story about accidentally wearing my homecoming dress to my first day of work on the Hill because I didn’t know what people on the Hill wore. It was just so bad. I look back on that version and I’m like, oh my God.
Anne Meeker: Baby staffer life.
Ashley Julyan: It was baby staffer to the Nth degree. I was on the Hill in a capacity working in the sales space for one of the CRM vendors. At that point, that vendor had a huge market share, but being totally honest, the product was very limited in terms of sex appeal. It was very janky and had such a large market share that being in charge of sales for IQ, there wasn’t really a lot of space for growth.
So I looked to other outreach tools and communications that could live back and connect to that CRM, which stayed as the holistic endpoint for all constituent communications. That brought in additional staffers like the chief of staff, communications director, even the Member into these outreach tools, that could then have that historical data live there. So that’s when I got really involved in the space of understanding voter file data with L2, telephone town halls, texting, digital ads, print mail — basically anything that worked its way through the paid communications space and franking became something that I was interested in. That helped really propel the organization to grow as a whole in terms of annual sales.
Then we got hit with COVID, and I was the crypt keeper of telephone town halls during 2020. I was able to see that there was such a discrepancy between parties in terms of not only how different communication tools were being leveraged, but why they were leveraging them, when they were leveraging them, what they were saying on these different platforms.
So in 2021, I branched off and I formed the AEJ Group. That group was founded on helping elected officials in the Democratic Party understand more holistically how to use these paid communications tools, and basically what levers to pull and when to meet their goals. Because, depending on what the Member’s goal is going to be, you’re going to want to acquire a different set of tools to meet those goals. For instance, a lot of offices are focused on building up their subscriber list, where other offices, maybe a freshman Member, are working more on name ID, branding, getting folks to know who that Member is and what they represent. There are also political considerations — are they a safe seat or are they a frontline member? Are they being primaried? Those are all things that have to be accounted for when the office is making budget decisions, especially making budget decisions around paid communications.
The budgets that we work with — I think one of the unique things about us is we can kick it with any budget. Sometimes it’s been a couple thousand dollars a year. Other clients spend upwards of six figures. So it can be very scalable. And I think that’s something also that with this paid communications space is really appealing to a congressional office that’s often operating on a tight budget. It’s not the same as perhaps what they have on the political side.
At the same time, when we’re talking about communications and CRM and what I do, the fact of the matter is these CRMs are not set up to be communication shops. And that’s what I struggle with when I see a lot of the marketing that comes out from them, because you don’t know the best practices. All of the vendors are just outsourcing the telephone town hall experience to the exact same vendors. So you could do it with me, who does this all day, every day. Like I think we were talking about before we went live — this week alone, when this week closes, we’ll have done over 65 telephone town halls this month since the shutdown started. There’s nobody that knows what they’re doing like we do. I can share insights: here’s what questions we’re seeing, be prepared for this. Here are poll questions that I think are going to perform well on your call. Here’s how to best leverage this limited budget, because offices weren’t planning on doing shutdown town halls, obviously, and they’re going to have to pull this money from somewhere. So I know that that comes at the expense of something else.
And so what I want to do is, regardless of whatever budget we’re working with, I want to make sure that they’re getting their biggest bang for their buck. And I think that’s something that our team has a really unique perspective and insight into.
Anne Meeker: That’s awesome. And let me actually just go back here. I feel like this is one of these episodes where I’m going to have to publish a glossary because you and I are both so deep in the weeds.
For folks who are listening to this from a Congressional background or current staffers, they’re going to be clapping and cheering because the CRM is such a pain point for everybody. But for folks outside of this ecosystem, I don’t think it’s super well known how much these three big CRMs really structure everything that Congress does. Can you just briefly walk through the purpose of a CRM?
Ashley Julyan: Totally. Putting my sales hat back on. Basically it serves as the backbone of your office. It’s the system in which every single constituent interaction ideally lives. Whether that’s working from the front desk to the back office, that’s the staffers that are answering the phone or logging those calls.
Folks that are writing in to you, that’s going to the team for a response, whether that’s via email or print mail. They’re writing these policy letters. It starts with the draft from the legislative correspondent. The legislative assistant will weigh in. Usually the legislative director will have sign-off on the final language before it goes out as a mass response.
But then you also have the newsletter, which is what touches the communication space. The communications director, press secretary, sometimes even the LC gets pulled in to do that or the list management side of it. And then of course, the chief of staff and the Member will see the overall analytics coming out of it. They’re not necessarily going to be in it day to day, although I do have some chiefs that will go in on a regular basis and be able to see what’s going on. And that’s just the DC office.
If you zoom out and now you’re looking at the district office, the front office is processing incoming phone calls or requests. But that district team and field team, what they’re there to do is process constituent casework. I see that a lot in town halls. We get a lot of people that are either saying, “Hey, you helped me with this benefit that I wasn’t receiving” or “Your team was so fantastic to work with.” Or they’re saying, “Hey, I am a veteran, I’m not getting my benefits. Can you help me?” Telephone town halls can actually be a forum to launch casework from.
So I think all of that casework, all those interactions, all those touchpoints, all live in this CRM system. So it’s a very wide, encompassing tool that basically every staffer in theory could use in their role. I think though, it’s viewed, because of the limited options and experience, as something that staff almost feel like they grow out of in their career a little bit — except for on the casework side, because they’re all ninjas doing God’s work out there.
With the CRMs that are available on the Hill, you’re really operating almost with one hand tied behind your back because you don’t have access to the latest and greatest technology. You have a menu that you have to pick from, and my clients will ask me all the time, which one should I choose? And I say that they’re all like airlines—you’re loyal to one until it screws you over and you need to move to another one. I know that’s unfair, but each one has its own pros and cons, and it just doesn’t feel like there’s a real leader right now. Each one has its own area that it excels in, but there’s not one that stands out to me that’s like, oh, this is the best one you could possibly have, and I would tell everyone to go with it. I’ve heard that there are new CRMs that are trying to break into the market that I’m really excited about. I don’t know if we’re allowed to say their names or not yet, but I think that that is exactly what this market needs.
But also at the same time, you have to weigh that against the bureaucracy and the red tape that the House puts in place for new technology to emerge into this space. We’ve had pushback on the most basic requests that just fall into a black hole, never to be seen again.
Anne Meeker: Yeah, that is absolutely true for caseworkers. But I think that’s such an interesting point, that just because there are only these three CRMs for the Hill, and they are built on this particular philosophy of how Members and their constituents interact — it’s very much built on a sales system, it’s not even built on necessarily a modern communications system. The philosophy of the CRMs is then determining what features are available for Members to interact with their constituents. So it’s just an interesting moment of seeing a particular worldview come into a Congressional space, not deliberately, but just because these are the tools available.
Ashley Julyan: Right. And I think you see, even like, I love the work that House Digital Services is doing — Ananda and [Steve] Dwyer and that whole gang. I think they’re all trying, but I feel like they’re basically having to fill in these voids because none of these other systems are fulfilling those needs. And then as a result of that though, you’re ending up again with these disjointed systems. There’s no overall holistic approach of where someone can go and really see your interactions with this person. I don’t think that truly exists right now. I mean, people ask all the time, “Why don’t you build a CRM?” And I’m like, no.
Anne Meeker: It’s such a thankless job, as we’re discussing.
Ashley Julyan: I’m like, no, but I love the idea, though, of building out — with all my free time when we’re not doing town halls — some sort of communications dashboard space where you can see, like, give me everybody based on voting history and criteria and the fact that you can target by ideology, even though you can’t target by political party.
But if you’re like, give me all the single moms with dogs that drive SUVs that care about coin collecting, I can go find you that list. And then let’s go look at what we’ve done with them. I don’t know. I think there’s just a lot of data out there right now, more than ever, and I think that offices don’t necessarily know or are able to have the bandwidth to take advantage of it. I mean, I think that also speaks to the staff turnover on the Hill right now too, which is at an all-time high.
Anne Meeker: Yeah, definitely. And I know that there’s some data on that. So that actually really is a beautiful segue to talking about what you do with the AEJ Group. So take your CRM hat back off. You’re talking about being able to take a holistic view and really help offices understand the tools that they have available. So what do y’all do? Give me the overview.
Ashley Julyan: Yeah, I mean, if you think of it in the most basic buckets, it’s mail, phone, and digital. But I think it’s certainly far beyond that. But even there, it’s such an education piece to offices about understanding what I said at the beginning — what tools can be in your toolkit and how to use them and when. In terms of mail, of course we can do print mail projects all across the country with the union bug. We do everything a little bit differently, though, because we understand a lot of the franking requirements. So when it comes to helping the office with language or doing the graphic design and layout, we know what fonts are the right sizes and what photos are okay to use and not use. And no, for whatever reason, you’re not allowed to do a magnet. And that is a fun fact you can go check on. No magnets, no calendars. It’s a very hot topic in December.
But print, it’s so much more than that. I think this year we did so many Know Your Rights palm cards, even Know Your Rights screensavers that we could do with text messages, and constituent services brochures, things like that. There’s just a lot in that space that you can expand upon. And then that’s the mail bucket.
And then phones. There’s everything from telephone town halls, which we’ll talk about today, to phone surveys — which are not polling. I mean, you can do some poll-esque questions, but every time I tell offices we can do some polling, they’re like, “No, no, no, no, no.” I’m like, “No, no, it’s not like what you think.” It’s like, “Hey, I’m Member X and one of my big initiatives is Meals on Wheels. Do you support those types of things? Yes or no?”
Anne Meeker: Wait, what is the pushback on polling?
Ashley Julyan: A lot, because people just associate it with the political side. It’s like, “Oh no, no, no, no. I don’t want to get in trouble with our campaign.” I’m like, “No, I promise. We’re going very different directions with this.” But it’s also honestly, low-key, such a cheap way to get subscribers too, because the pricing is so affordable and being able to reach an audience and then at the end of that poll be like, “Hey, if you want to sign up for my newsletter or future updates, press one.” They’re already on. They just answered eight questions. They’re probably going to say yes. And we love that.
And then we’ve got telephone town halls. We do those on both the official and political side. Phone surveys. And then of course, texting, which is one of our basic bread and butter things. I’ve seen a lot of vendors come into this space recently too, but I think what has been really unique is our approach to it. Again, that we’re not just a churn and burn service provider. We’re actually able to proactively reach out and say, “Hey, this office did this thing and it performed really well, and their district has similar demographics or your member has similar areas of interest. I think this would perform well for you.” And we just try to take that lift off the office.
The amount of stuff that’s on a communications director’s plate right now is bananas. I can’t imagine. I feel like I want our team to be the back office to any communications director. I want it to be so that when the communications director walks by, everyone’s freaking out and popping bottles and telling them how incredible they are and all their new subscribers and engagement and followers and things like that. But I always have to be cognizant of the fact that they’re also putting out press releases, maintaining all the media contacts, scheduling media hits, maintaining that side of things. I always tell people, you focus on the earned media, I’ll help you on the paid media and kind of free up some space there.
So phones: telephone town halls, phone surveys, texting is really our jam.
And then digital, which is the fastest growing segment, I think, obviously across anything. It used to be just talking to Members to get them up on Facebook. I remember when — I remember when I worked on the Hill, back in my day, not even every office had a communications director. When I was still working at IQ, that was a cool new title. Director of Strategic Digital Engagement. I mean, we have come so far.
But in digital, it’s such a spectrum. I say at one side, it’s just platform-based advertising. You’ve got Meta as a platform you’re advertising on. You’re banking on people being on Meta and seeing your ad and clicking on it. Why do I love Meta though? It’s cheap. It gets you follows, it gets you subscribers. It’s certainly the cheapest acquisition for a new subscriber. But you’re limiting yourself to a very small proportion of your district, and Facebook tends to skew older and tends to skew a little bit more female. And honestly, those people are probably already voting for you. So if you want to expand your horizons beyond people that meet this certain Facebook-esque demographic, because you’re already hitting them — they’re going to read your mail, they’re going to be on your town halls, they’re going to be following you on digital — you need to focus on growing that next generation of voters.
And that’s where I think the entire rest of the digital spectrum comes into place. I mean, programmatic digital display sounds spooky and scary, but the fact is, it’s just advertising on ESPN.com, cooking channels or cooking recipes. You’re pulling up something and being able to see advertisements from your Member. And it’s not like, “Vote for me,” that’s what franking is [preventing]. It’s like being able to share, “Did you know I can help you with these constituent services?” or “Are you feeling directly impacted by XYZ policy?” or collecting stories. Right now we’re doing a lot of sharing stories-vibe. And I think that digital advertising is such an amazing way to do that because not only are you reaching folks that might not see your stuff online, it’s really the only way to engage with this younger audience. They’re not on Facebook. They’re probably not picking up your telephone town hall call. They’re definitely screening their calls. My new phone is screening calls. I don’t even know how to un-screen it. I’m just seeing text voicemails. I don’t know what’s happening. Am I old?
But I think that with digital, you have the ability to target. You have the ability to isolate folks based on similar interests. And the newest thing — not to just go on a tangent, but I will, because it’s super hype — the newest thing that we’ve been doing, and I’ve got a couple offices running them now, they’re called “discovery ads.” Basically, you can start off with a multi-question or a multi-answer question: “What do you want to see more of in Congress? Is it more bipartisan work? Is it policies that are more conservative, more progressive, or other?” And then based on how you answer that question, you can then be fed into a new ad set that is targeted based on your previous response selection. So if you’re focusing on more bipartisan solutions, you’ll see an ad set that highlights how often the Member is crossing the aisle to push legislation through that supports the constituents in their area.
And then what’s so crazy about it is that it actually learns based off your responses. It goes and builds lookalike audiences. So now you’re reaching new people in your district that you might not have ever hit before, just based off similar profile characteristics, search history, things like that. So if I’m searching online for a new pair of Nikes and also what are the best options for painting a room white and you’re looking down the rabbit hole of 700 shades, it will also go to find people that are searching Nikes and also care about finding the right perfect shade of white for painting your room. And whether or not I was on the office’s initial radar or not, it’s now able to pull me into that conversation. And that, I think, is going to be a game changer. I pitched it this year to the DCCC. I think that’s going to be something that they need to fold into their toolkit immediately.
Anyway, so digital is crazy. You can do anything. The targeting is wild. We love it. It’s very cost effective.
And then from there you’re going into CTV, OTT, the streaming space. YouTube obviously is huge. More than ever we see people that are doing these media consumption surveys. And even though, please stop doing them on the official side: I promise I can tell you where your voters are getting data from.
But on YouTube, I love it because it’s obviously something everyone’s using. But the thing that sucks about it is that because offices are considered political entities, you can only target by age and geographic location, nothing else. So all the other tools that we have — we talked about earlier, find me single moms that have dogs that drive SUVs and care about coin collecting — I can’t find those same people on YouTube right now because of the current restrictions. So it’s certainly a must-have in a strategy where that budget allows for a digital presence. But if we’re working on a constricted budget, I’d rather go CTV, because the fact of the matter is, it opens up the door in terms of who we’re able to hit and when in a meaningful way. That’s a really long answer for “I do everything.” And we also do billboards. We did airport ads. I remember we had an airport in one district. I think right now, I think Democrats should be geofencing every single airport and capturing those device IDs and then being like, “How was that experience during the shutdown?”
Anne Meeker: But that is wild, though. Again, this is my hobby horse. Let me climb up on my soapbox for one second. I think the political science world, civic engagement world just has no idea on the whole what is possible for official communications. So if we’re talking about how Congress needs to do a better job of outreach to different demographics and people who aren’t the usual suspects, there are so many tools available, there are so many data-tested ways of doing this.
Ashley Julyan: Yeah, I mean, I couldn’t agree more. And what I love about my team — I mean, they are, I am basically just a professional hype girl. Like at this point I am their hype girl because they are so incredible. The way that they think about leveraging new technology and pushing things to the limit in terms of what we think we can do — even the most basic stuff of figuring out if we could stream on the Hallmark Channel during Christmas. I’m like, why are you guys so smart?
Just new ways of reaching people. They constantly amaze me. And what’s been the most exciting to see this year too is how to layer these pieces. Okay, I have offices that are ride or die print people, but now we’re pairing: on that print mailer, let’s put our ten-digit phone number that they can text. We can put a question on there and they can text us back.
We did one that’s like, “Do you support an assault-style weapons ban? Let me know yes or no.” It’s like a gun safety, kids back-to-school kind of mailer. And we had folks texting back. So now we’ve cross-trained paper to texting. And then we pair that then with a digital ad campaign that runs both ahead of the mailer dropping, and we do it just to that list of folks that are getting the mailer. And then after that mailer, now people are actually not only getting the mailer, but instead of it going mailbox to trash can, they already are expecting it.
And this is the way that you can start to build a story and tell a story to voters. Where it’s not just like, I think offices are like, “Oh, on our calendar for the year, we have to do two town halls and we do one mailer.” It’s like, why? But what are you trying to do? It’s like, “Well, that’s just what we’ve always done.” It’s like, but what are our goals here? And I think that’s something I’ve been able to really hold a mirror up to and be like, what are we trying to accomplish here? And what does your boss want to get out of these engagements? And how can I make this and stretch this as effectively as possible for your team and your boss?
So I think that’s been the coolest thing about this year, it’s just seeing the ways that we layered on, like a text before, a text after a telephone town hall, and now the engagement is through the roof. We can take the call list, isolate just the cells, split it into two lists. “Hey, thanks for joining. We talked about a bunch of stuff. I want to hear from you on just one more thing.” Or the folks that didn’t join, “Hey, I tried to hit you up. I’m going to try again. But your opinion is so really important to me. Can you let me know what you think about this one thing?”
And it goes from now being a missed call to a subscriber and someone who’s invested in getting your newsletter. And I think, and then the text messages, after we have the survey, they include a “Follow me on Facebook or Instagram or Bluesky or whatever.” So this is a new way of thinking about constituent engagement. And I think I’m really excited to see where it goes. I hope everybody’s going to steal all my ideas.
Anne Meeker: They’re 100% — I know, it’s very generous of you to talk us through the secret sauce here. But absolutely, for all 15 of our subscribers here to talk us through this.
Ashley Julyan: Hit me up.
Anne Meeker: Okay. All right. We’re dancing around it and I’m just so excited. So you’ve mentioned telephone town halls a few times. I am so curious.
Ashley Julyan: All right. Oh my God, what do you want to know?
Anne Meeker: So where do you even start here? There’s so much we could dig into. Teletownhalls have been a part of Congressional outreach for a while, right? You mentioned doing this work in 2020 where they really took off in a crazy way during the pandemic.
Ashley Julyan: Yes, yes. I remember seeing town halls pre-COVID, trying to get people interested and excited about them. But now it’s just a whole new — I mean, we’re doing events with 18,000 people, and that is crazy. And I think from the staffers’ perspective, filling up some room or a stadium with 18,000 people, 20,000 people, 5,000 people, it would take months of planning.
And I think that’s the beauty of telephone town halls. They’re quick, they’re accessible, they’re scalable, and we get folks on the phone in real time to be able to have a live dialogue with their Member of Congress. And that, I think, is what is changing the game. I mean, I have a handful of Members that stand out to me in particular, but there are a lot of folks doing some really unique and interesting stuff with town halls.
I mean, okay, I’ll just name drop a few. Janelle Bynum. She is incredible. I am her number one stan. Their town halls are so good. She’s so authentic. She’s so pure and true and real with the voters. I’m always just like, why am I crying? You’re so good.
I mean, we did one with Joyce Beatty’s office and they did it all “The View”-style in the House recording studio. And they had Morgan McGarvey and Glenn Ivey and that looked so good. And that content now lives and they can share it with folks. And they’re actually planning another event for tomorrow, Wednesday. But then, I think of one last year or two that always stands out: Emilia Sykes did one with a domestic abuse [victim] coach that helped talk about — it was right when that AirTag regulation dropped about how you can’t have AirTags following you around, or you need to know. And she had this counselor for victims of domestic violence on, and the questions that we got in and we’re able to answer were just so moving and so impactful. I just think that these are such an incredible forum. And if you’re not doing them, you’re missing a huge opportunity, a huge opportunity. You can fill rooms with them.
They’re really — I mean, we make them fast. I’ll walk you through my mental checklist, okay? An office will call me, and they say, “Hey, we want to do a telephone town hall.” Today’s Monday. They want to do it on Wednesday. I say, “Okay, no problem.” First of all, absolutely could be any time. We love our Hawaii clients, for instance. We love doing a town hall at midnight or 1 AM, happily. And they’re incredible. Ed Case’s office, he answers every single question, every single one. And they don’t screen out any. And I’m always just so impressed. Anyways, you get on the calendar, date, and time. We make sure that we do a couple things differently. We set up a custom caller ID for that, which means that if someone misses the call for the town hall and they call it back, the district office isn’t getting bombarded with phone calls all at the same time. We get it on the calendar. We’re able to help them generate their scripts. We tell them they need to go to franking if they’re tailoring around the government shutdown right now — we’re writing a lot of scripts that help focus in on that topic — but you can also just submit them as very generic and be one and done for the year, and then you don’t have to worry about that again.
We get them a dial-in number for participants if they want to be able to share that number. I will say this year I’ve been a little bit more skeptical about encouraging offices to share that number because it can be an uncapped cost. And that can be a little spooky, especially for our clients in the DC, DMV area where we have such a high presence of federal workers. But we’re able to basically get the list, get the ideas, train the staff, pull the list, schedule the event, be there on-site and in person, pull the report, monitor the event. And then we’ll flag casework requests in real time, or if the boss on the call says, “Hey, that’s a great question. I’ll get back to you,” we’ve already captured their information. It’s in an email ready for follow-up.
And then after the event is over, our reports are able to share analytics like, “This is the average call time. Here’s where X percent are longer. Or here’s what we think we could do to help boost attendance over time and keep folks on the phone longer.”
But during the duration of an event, usually they’re 60 minutes. It’s an all-hands-on-deck thing from the staff perspective. They’ll have the boss, someone with the boss usually, and then you’ve got your question picker, and that’s the person that’s looked at all the screened questions and is deciding which ones we want to take live and when and what order. Like, “I want Ashley’s question, then Annie’s question, then Joe’s question.” You’ve got a moderator. I love an event without a moderator, but a lot of times offices want a moderator as a security blanket. So they’re basically the emcee. They’re like, “And up next is Ashley Julyan from Bethesda. What’s your question, Ashley?” And then they take me live. I ask my question, they mute me back, and then they queue to pull questions, things like that.
That’s the basic setup.
Anne Meeker: Just on the moderators, when you see offices with moderators, is that a staff member? Do they get someone from the community? Is there a trend there?
Ashley Julyan: Yeah, I would say most offices, if they use — well, I don’t say most offices. I would say there’s been a trend recently actually towards the Member moderating it themselves. I think that has higher engagement and just feels a little bit more authentic. But if you are going to have a moderator, I would say it’s split pretty 50/50 between my team providing a professional moderator or the staff doing it.
That feels like it’s kind of — it doesn’t really — there’s, I mean, the professional moderator’s nice because it takes one thing off the office’s plate, somebody that you know is going to be connected remotely, going to be able to take folks live, knows the drill, doesn’t need training. I think that is helpful in a pinch.
But also it’s such an easy process. Once you do it once, you’re like, “See, you guys could do this.” Or like, “Hey, Member, we could do this without one,” because I just love me an event with no moderator. I just think it sounds so authentic and you get these moments of, I don’t know, like, “I didn’t know you would actually call on me, I’m in the grocery store right now!” And you’re like, “I love you. I’m so glad you participated.” I just love that kind of stuff. It’s just such an authentic connection then, such a moment where, and then all these other people get to hear it too. So I’m not totally altruistic. I also think it’s good for the boss.
So you’ve got all hands on deck, you got three to five screeners, you got one person capturing newsletter signups. You’ve got somebody reviewing all the questions and deciding which ones you want to take live. You’ve got that person communicating it to the moderator. You’ve got somebody behind the scenes putting in talking points in a Google Doc. And all of this can blow up so quickly, so easily. And then the boss wants to go rogue and you’re like, “And we just roll with this.” They want no talking points, they want nothing. They’re like, “Just let me go.” And I’m like, “Great, let’s do it.”
Anne Meeker: That’s awesome. I cannot get over just the diversity of, it sounds like, ways Members approach doing a town hall, the purpose of a town hall.
Ashley Julyan: It’s crazy. It’s literally crazy. We can do anything. I’ve seen it all.
Anne Meeker: Because I think that gets to a lot of the criticism of telephone town halls, right? Especially this year, where a lot of Members, both sides of the aisle, for whatever reason — political safety, security, whatever — have gone away from doing in-person events. And I think the criticism there is always like, “Well, if it’s a telephone town hall, it’s super scripted. It keeps constituents at a distance.”
But it sounds like those decisions are not necessarily inherent in the form of a teletownhall. The decisions to open it, to make it how scripted it is, is on the Member and their team.
Ashley Julyan: Right. We can put as many guardrails as we want on it. But the fact of the matter is, you’re still having your Member of Congress speak directly to a constituent who’s asking their question live in front of thousands of other people who might have that exact same question. I think if anything, it’s a forum that should be — I mean, I’m probably going to hate myself for saying this — but used more by Members. Because again, the legwork and the lift behind the scenes, we’re able to help so much with that. And then the Member, really what we want to do is just have them plop down and answer questions and be able to get through as many as we can in an hour.
And I mean, I’ve seen it also, the way that it works on the political side is incredible. Being able to get folks involved in the campaign side of things. And being able — because a lot of times Members get questions that are like, “What are you going to do about XYZ?” And they can’t, on the official side, use their money to be talking about things that are political. And so they’re always so cognizant and amazing about being like, “I wish I could talk about that, but this has to be in this chamber and not in this space.” And it’s like, then you should be doing a town hall. Clearly your constituents want to ask about these things.
But I think it’s honestly one of the most valuable tools. You’re connecting. And the thing now is, it’s just like when I started, it was an old school town hall. You could only call landlines. [Today,] you can call cell phones, you can text people a link to join, you can live stream it on Facebook, YouTube, Restream, whatever, all the channels digital. Put it on YouTube. Now you’re connecting with folks wherever they are. And I think that is something that not a lot of platforms are able to do and offer you that option. And especially when so many folks are consuming their news online, to be able to have that online presence, but with an authentic Q&A format, it’s a chef’s kiss for constituent engagement.
Anne Meeker: That’s awesome. Again, these kinds of — I’m so lucky that I get to have these kinds of conversations as part of my job because this is the bit where I’m like, there is a future to constituent engagement, there is creativity.
Ashley Julyan: It’s not dead, yeah.
Anne Meeker: Yeah, there’s a lot of hope. And in conversations like this one. So as we’re wrapping up—
Ashley Julyan: I didn’t crush your spirits.
Anne Meeker: I know, as we’re in the middle of a government shutdown. But we’ll keep improving. So as we’re wrapping up, again, so delighted to get to pick your brain on everything that you do, especially in the town hall format. And it sounds like you guys are just putting together so many of the new pieces. So I feel like your response here might be different from some other folks. I always love to ask people I talk to, if you had a magic wand for constituent engagement, what would you do? What would be top of your wish list, AEJ Group style?
Ashley Julyan: For constituent engagement, knowing what I know about the House, I would make the House make all the CRM vendors plug into the same set of APIs from each channel so that there’s no more fighting about data conversion. I would — that would be step one, because that’s bonkers. When I have an office that’s like, “Oh, I can’t do this because then IQ is going to charge me $2,500,” and so we’re not doing something because we don’t want to pay to have our own data that we own put back into our system? Got it. Data interoperability. I feel like let’s have a standardized set of APIs that are available to everybody. Let’s have the same thing on the voter file data front. Why Fireside voter files are different than IQ voter files are different than the Indigov voter files, I don’t understand. It doesn’t make sense to me. When I’m helping offices curate this list, I shouldn’t have to play this guessing game of what data is in with what. And that would be one of my immediate short-term things.
I think at a holistic level, data integrity would be huge. I mean, whenever I’m in an office, there’s only a handful of people that actually know how to use the system. And it’s because it’s so hard to use. The onboarding is impossible. And then after six months, your LC dipping and going somewhere else. And that new staffer comes in and you have to start all the way back at the beginning because everything is so convoluted and hard. It doesn’t have to be that way in my mind.
Make all of the systems plug in to the telephone town hall space…
I could go on. I got a lot. I think that you should be able to put a pixel on a website, to be able to, on your Member’s website, to be able to see how much traffic you’ve been able to drive to it from a specific outreach.
I have a lot.
Anne Meeker: But just that list, it’s just emphasizing to me, again, as always, how hacked together the ecosystem for Congressional tech and Congressional communications is. A tracking pixel is standard practice, but the fact that it’s—
Ashley Julyan: Not on a House website, they’re not. And that’s something I would like to take on in a bipartisan effort for, right? I want offices to be able to import their telephone town hall data without feeling like they have to pay for it. That’s crazy. That’s crazy. Especially when these vendors have APIs that already plug into the same system that we’re all plugged into. Why wouldn’t you want your office to have the best version of their data?
And also maybe the CRMs need to stop operating in the communications space. Give it up. You’re not a communications shop, you’re not a messaging wizard. Back up and focus on your own stuff, and you might have a better product for it. Rather than publishing that you’re the leader in texting, I’d love to see it. Show me.
Anne Meeker: Oh no, it’s fascinating. I think it would be very interesting to see how the House and Senate would operate with, instead of one big CRM, multiple small pieces.
Ashley Julyan: Yeah. I mean, the Senate its own whole thing. I mean, God love the offices that moved over from the House to the Senate and were willing to bring me over. But it’s a monopoly over there. There’s nothing. I’m like, just so you know, it’s the exact same system. So do you want someone who’s going to do everything for you? Do you want somebody who’s not going to do everything for you and outsource it? But whatever.
Anne Meeker: Absolutely.
Ashley Julyan: Come on, Senate. I’m ready. Senate offices, come on. Come all. We can run it back.
Anne Meeker: You’re going to actually get this done, which I appreciate so much. Ashley, it is so much fun getting to hang out.
Ashley Julyan: I love you.
Anne Meeker: I love that.
Ashley Julyan: This podcast, I didn’t have to get all dolled up. I would just hang out on Zoom. Keep going all day.
Anne Meeker: All right. Well, we’re just going to have you come join us on the next episode too.
Ashley Julyan: Make up another topic. I will come, perfect.
Anne Meeker: On time too.
Ashley Julyan: Some things we would change with the House. Oh yeah, that would be a fun one.
Anne Meeker: We could do that. Oh my gosh. Well, yeah, I was going to say we have to do a panel show and get Annelise on here too.
Ashley Julyan: Oh, could you imagine.
Anne Meeker: We’d have a great time. Great time. Ashley, thank you.
Ashley Julyan: Thank you so much. You’re incredible. I’m so grateful. I love you guys. Say hi to Marci.
Anne Meeker: The feeling is mutual. Thank you so much for your time.
Ashley Julyan: Thanks.
Voice/Mail is a Substack newsletter about how people and their governments talk to each other. Learn more and subscribe at voicemailgov.substack.com.
