Two weeks ago, the DIAtribe picked the brain of Owen Henkel at the Center for Constitutional Rights on the hit Send Bush a Copy of the Constitution action they've been running.

So, after everyone clicks-here-to-take-action, what happens? Did they actually deliver all the Constitutions?

Well ... sort of. Here's a wink-nod wrap to the action with a little virality of its own:

The DIA Salsa users at the Center for Constitutional Rights recently gave a great illustration of the power of smart targeting and messaging to balloon an online list ... paired, of course, with one smooth-handling e-advocacy tool.

I caught CCR's Owen Henkel on the way out the door to a well-deserved break to find out just how they cooked up the pitch-perfect Send Bush a Copy of the Constitution online action.

How did you come up with it? Were you looking specifically for something with virality, or did that follow the brilliance of the idea?

My fondness for liberals, smart people, and Wisconsin politicians (not to mention good food) aided in my decision to read the Environmental Working Group's recent email on their Organics Petition.

Even though Development Associate David (no, I didn't realize that was his title until I searched their site) once spent a good amount of a phone call laughing at my Wisconsin accent when I was trying to explain tags, I enjoy working with the EWG.

But even more notably, I enjoy well-crafted campaigns. This action nicely displays a few ways to make them suck less (albeit in the service of an uphill struggle):

Step 1: Pictures are worth a thousand words.

This video was short, energizing, and provided a terrific visual of the support already behind the bill. It's one thing to be told about an issue, but to see an example of what an organization is already doing is quite motivational.

Earth Day Network, one of our newer users, is hailing the approach of their signature holiday with multiple online actions.

The action here is pretty straightforward as pertains the technics -- there's also a pledge to use energy-efficient bulbs, which is a basic signup page -- but it's drawing traffic from several enormous mailing lists looking for topical links and turning its supporter signup chart vertical.

This post is a bit of a catch-up; a couple of weeks before we launched this blog, the Congressional Management Foundation released a report about how Congress is handling the flood of citizen e-mail.

As we've known for a while, they're struggling.

I did my time in the Capitol Hill intern factory in the mid 90's. The communication was pretty much all of the traditional variety, but here's how we handled it:

• Mail and faxes went to a back room, where a recluse spent the entire day shuffling it into various subject cubbies ("Defense," "Environment," etc.), which then went to the staffers covering that area. These in turn parsed them however they liked to get a feel for the issue, and had their interns generate the tedious blow-off replies you get when you write to Congress.
• Phone calls relating to upcoming votes generated a tally. We rotated duties and just put a mark on a sheet: Fer it or agin it. We all indulged the temptation to cook those tallies now and again. At the end of the day, we'd pass on the sheets of tally marks.
  

Every office is a little different, but this is not the sort of institutional agility that was going to make a rapid adaptation to a medium allowing thousands of instant communications. Nowadays, your best case scenario for an Internet campaign is that it's handled like those phone calls and tallied, or at least approximated.