So, on the channel we spend a lot of time talking about communications theories, language use, and the structure of ideas,
so here's an opportunity to put all that theory into practice.
Contact your representatives.
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Now this is advice that you'll find embedded in every political call to action.
Whenever a journalist asks an activist, "What can people do?", the top of the list is always "Contact your representatvies".
So this is going to be a concrete overview of what that means, and how you should do it.
Now, I'm going to try to make this generalized for any legislative democratic system
but it will still be ever so slightly slanted towards the United States owing to their...recent turn of events.
First, what do you want? Always have a clear goal. Your communication needs to be focused and ask a specific question.
And keep it contained: one call, one subject. If there's 20 things you want to say, get ready to write 20 letters.
What you're really looking for is a strong call to action that requires some kind of feedback.
You are contacting your rep and there is something you want. Can they do it?
Even when you're calling to express general dissatisfaction, you want to structure it in a way that asks for a direct response.
The reason for that is when you get someone to formulate a response, you are getting them to come up with verifiable claims, promises, or statements of intent
to which they should be held accountable.
If you are holding them to account, then you're asking them to reconcile promises with reality.
And what you're actually looking for is uncertainty, a point where the representative's platform is weak or disconnected,
because that's a gap for negotiation.
That's the path to saying, "Hey, here's a better, stronger, more just, more moral, more compassionate platform.
Here's the human impact, here's the human cost, and here's what you can do about it."
Second, what level of government are you looking to contact?
This is going to have a dramatic impact on your plan.
The more local you aim your communications, the easier it is to get an ear.
There's a couple of reasons for this. The obvious is that representative systems are pyramid shaped.
The people towards the top represent a lot more individuals than the people towards the bottom,
so there's simply more people who want their time.
Tied to that, the people towards the top have a lot more power, so getting their attention has potentially greater payoffs.
The more local you get--state or provincial, municipality or county--the easier it is to get someone's ear.
Not to say it's a guarantee, they're still busy people. Being an alderman in a mid-size city is still a full-time job.
But they and their assistants won't be getting the same sheer volume of communication that a congressman's office will be.
But this is going to be the biggest question to answer, because it's going to inform just about everything about your strategy.
What methods of communication do you use? How do you time it? How is it structured? Do you coordinate with others? And so on.
Third, have you done your research?
What do you know about your representatives and their stance on various subjects? What's their voting record look like?
Now, a lot of this stuff might be online, available in summary from various stakeholders like activist groups,
and you should definitely check their website or Twitter feed or Facebook for some official platform.
but this is also a perfectly valid thing to open up lines of communications with.
Especially for phone calls, it can be good practice.
You're calling your representative's office because you want to know how they voted on a given bill and you're having trouble finding it online.
Or you read their platform, but some statements were vague and you want clarification.
Because keep in mind that nothing will undermine your communication faster
than an angry phone call where a staffer kindly explains that Representative Clark did, in fact, vote No.
Just the same as your reps lose credibility when it's clear, in your eyes, that they don't know what they're talking about,
the same will happen to you if it's obvious that you haven't done your homework.
Now, generally speaking, you want to stick to your representatives
because staffers are conditioned to discard contact from non-constituents out of hand,
but this isn't a hard and fast rule.
As part of the government, representatives have additional roles and responsibilities on various committees and boards,
and if you have a concern relevant to those roles, then yes, you should contact them.
Fourth, what's the relationship like?
Is it adversarial? This means that you don't agree with the representatives politics, you don't agree with their policies,
or they're doing something and you want them to do the opposite instead.
The degree to which the relationship is supportive or adversarial is huge because
the further you need to persuade someone to move, the greater an impact you need to make.
And while we're here, "contact your representatives" doesn't just mean "convince them to oppose something",
it also means, "let them know if they're doing a good job".
Let them know you support them, and contact them to ask if there's anything you can do to help.
Because if there is something you can do to help, if there's an open hearing you can attend, if there's a rally you can volunteer for, if there's a fund you can donate to,
they're going to know that.
Also, even if you know that the relationship is probably adversarial, always open your communication lines with the assumption that they're not.
Assume good faith. If they're making poor decisions, then assume they made a mistake or they were uninformed of the consequences.
This is particularly important when it comes to phone calls and talking with their staff.
Don't be mean. Be firm, be angry if you need to be, but don't be mean.
Fifth, what channels of communication are you looking to use?
Ranked in order of impact, the options are face-to-face, phone calls, physical mail, e-mail, and social media.
Physical mail, e-mail, and social media are all text based, and they're all discretionary,
meaning the recipient can engage with them at their own pace on their own time,
and you can write them from home, proofread, and really put a lot of work into crafting a very tight message.
Social media is cheap, it's instant, and it's public. Those attributes make it useful, but also make it popular,
meaning that competition for attention, for mental bandwidth, is very high.
Social media also tends to be poor at communicating long, complex ideas.
This has to do with user interfaces, character limits, and the reader's state of mind while engaging with the service.
Basically, the medium is the message,
so with that in mind, social media tends to be best at communicating overall tone rather than specific ideas
unless those ideas are very simple and very short.
The main strength of social media is the public aspect.
Building momentum, getting others to join in, getting the attention of media, and creating public pressure.
E-mail is also cheap and instant, but it's a lot better suited to communicating longer ideas than social media.
It's also really easy to ignore, and really easy to sort and filter.
The busier an office is, the more inclined they're going to be to scan e-mails for general subject and respond with a form letter.
Now physical mail. In many places elected representatives are legally obligated to read every piece of mail that they get.
In practical terms, that usually means having their staff read it for them and sum it up or select a few exemplars,
but physical mail is still incredibly valuable.
The only downsides are that it's not instant, it is personally inconvenient, and it isn't free.
But here's the thing to keep in mind, and we're going to talk about phone calls in a second, which are super powerful,
but there's a particular strength of physical letters that nothing else can match.
And it's the role as a prop.
See, politics is entirely about persuasion, whether that be through force, money, rhetoric, or reason.
When your representatives go to the floor, their job is to try and persuade everyone else in the room to agree with them,
which means that there is a performative aspect to their job.
Think to yourself how many times you've seen a clip of a representative on the floor saying:
"Madam Speaker, Joe Beerdrinker from My Writing wrote me this letter, and in this letter he says..."
Writing to your representatives is literally an opportunity to put your words into their mouths.
The value of this is hard to overstate. It's a chance to have a direct impact on the way that an issue is framed, the language that is used, and the lens that it is projected through.
Think of how many issues today, from gender and sexuality to mental health, classism, race,
that are defined almost entirely by the language that people use, because that language sets the frame.
How many damaging policies are in place right now because of phrases like "Boys will be boys"?
Contacting your reps, letters in particular, is an opportunity to shape language.
Now, as a matter of protocol, you always want to prioritize the local office over the federal office,
and this goes for phone calls as well.
Phone calls are the single most effective channel of communication you have, without leaving your home.
Unlike written communication, phone calls aren't discretionary.
If you're on the phone right now, their staff needs to talk to you right now.
They can't skim your phone call for subject and tone at 9 PM while watching Stranger Things,
you have their time, right now.
Again, the reality is that you're more likely to talk to their staff than to them personally, especially at the federal level.
So the strategy, the game of persuasion that you're playing, is to impact the staff enough that the message gets passed on clearly and actionably.
And we'll come back to this later when we talk about strategy.
Now, as someone who hates making phone calls, yes, they can be intimidating.
Don't be ashamed to practice with a friend first, to roleplay, to make notes, or even write out your question or statement in advance.
You want to make a human connection, but you don't want your message to get lost or to be unclear.
Face-to-face meetings basically mean town hall meetings,
and town hall meetings are, generally, woefully under-attended by the same couple dozen people every single time.
This is good news. You can be one of those couple dozen people.
And if you show up with four, five, ten, twenty friends,
if you all prepare your questions beforehand, you can be a block that they can't ignore.
If you've ever screamed at a TV interviewer who just let a softball non-answer slide, town halls are your chance to fix that.
Finally, what's your strategy?
One of the most valuable things you can do is get a group together,
whether that means coordinating with a bunch of friends to send letters or phone calls at the same time,
or joining an advocacy group and coordinating with them,
the more voices you can add together, the more impactful the message will be.
If you pack a town hall meeting, then yes, your issues are going to be discussed.
If you tie up their staff on the phone all day, if that becomes a day where nothing else got done
because they were answering calls from constituents for six straight hours? Yeah, there's going to be follow-up.
Now, with that though, and this is going back to letter writing, be careful with form letters.
Advocacy groups will typically provide sample letters, and sending a form letter is better than sending nothing,
but humans are built for pattern recognition, so there's a very fine line here.
Common language, like specific phrasing, is a way to set the way that your concerns are framed.
If a staffer reads the same phrase over and over again, they're going to fall back on that phrasing when they pass the message along.
But if it's too similar? If it's clearly the exact same letter?
Well, then it just gets added to the stack. It doesn't have the same impact.
As an interjection, I'm stressing the value of acting as part of a group, but don't ever let the lack of a group stop you.
Because here's the thing: being politically active is a thing that happens over time.
Just because you don't have a group now, doesn't mean you won't have one two months from now, a year from now,
as you do more research, as you attend town halls, as you meet other people.
But if you never write a letter? If you never make a phone call? If you never go to a town hall? If you never start researching?
Well, let's just say it's unlikely that you'll just stumble into it in the future.
Activism is a skill, and like any other skill, it's built over time.
So don't just write or call once. Do it repeatedly, even if it's on the same issue.
If they're refusing to answer a reasonable policy question, stick with it.
Yes, I'd like to believe that most people have representatives that are ultimately rational and amenable to change,
but there will be adversarial relationships, if not outright hostile ones.
But repeat yourself if necessary.
Don't worry about being obnoxious, or rather, don't let the fear that you will be perceived as obnoxious stop you from writing or calling.
To a point, you do want to be a thorn in their side, because even when the relationship is hostile, volume matters.
One of the other things that should stand out at this point is the importance of a representative's staff.
They are part of the inner circle. They feed ideas and words and materials directly to them,
summarizing the vast bulk of information that comes in every day.
Their job is to interface with the constituency.
Get to know them. Meet them. Persuade them.
Strategy should also take a look at which levels of government you want to focus on.
In an ideal world, everyone has the time and energy to research, contact, and recontact their municipal, state, and federal representatives about every issue,
but...it's exhausting. It's a lot of information. It's a lot of time. It's a lot of energy.
The advice here changes a lot based on what the issue is that you're concerned about,
so you want to find the level where you can make the most tangible impact with the energy that you have available.
A lot of times that energy is actually going to be better directed a lot lower, at the civic or state level rather than federal.
See, even if the federal government sets the pace for policies surrounding, say, policing,
it's the civic leaders who actually meet with the police officers who live and work in your neighborhoods,
who tell the police chiefs what the citizens are saying.
It's a lot easier to get your city to change how it views mental health crises and whether 911 should send police or EMT's to those calls,
then it is to change the entire nation's stance.
And that flows upwards. Local successes become support for state programs. State successes become the case studies for federal policy.
It's a slow, grinding process, yes, but it is possible.
So...contact your representatives.
Thank you for watching.