Survey Briefing Points for Busy Officials:
Recipients and Distributors of White House Electronic Publications

Distribution

30,000 to 40,000 people get documents directly on a near daily basis. 90,000 to 100,000 more receive documents or reports on their content from the primary recipients through e-mail, face-to-face discussions, distributed hardcopy and telephone conversations.
A primary recipient may obtain documents in several means, with reported means averaging 1.3 per person. 40% of primary recipients receive documents through mailing lists; 40% retrieve from FTP and Gopher servers; 23% browse newsgroups on Usenet; 19% download from bulletin boards; 13% retrieve from forums on commercial networks.

Recipients are younger, more educated and more male than the national population. 85% are under 50, 75% completed college, 50% have post-graduate degrees and only 20% are women.
The primary affiliations of recipients, in descending order of frequency, are universities and colleges, government and military, private-sector high-tech companies, advocacy groups and economic interest groups. Few recipients are affiliated with elementary or high schools.
Every U.S. state has some recipients, with the greatest concentration found the Washington, DC area. 90% of recipients live in the U.S.; the remaining 10%are located in 25 foreign countries.
Recipients are more politically active than the general population. One third work regularly or occasionally for issues or candidates; one-third write letters to elected officials, and the least active third vote.

People use the documents more to keep informed, follow an issue or get a more direct view of political processes (65% of reported uses) than to acquire information for work or study (25%).
80% look at available documents at least several times a week and select documents to read by subject line; half spend 10 or more minutes per day reading them.
Two-thirds of recipients brought information from the documents into political discussions, with more people doing so to support than oppose the administration.
Recipients find the publication service satisfactory and valuable. 65% report satisfaction or extreme satisfaction, only 8% report dissatisfaction; electronic publication is rated important by 29% and highly important by 50%.