Develop an effective message
The importance of having a compelling and concise message cannot be overstated. Elected officials are busy people with constant demands on their time. Even in a face-to-face meeting, you may have only ten minutes or less to make your case.
In next month's organizing corner, we focus entirely on how to develop a winning message, so we will save an elaborate discussion of message until then. The key point is to deliver a message to an elected official is that concise, clear, and compelling. Know exactly what you are asking the legislator to do, i.e. support specific legislation.
Brevity is critical. Putting together a ten-point program with detailed graphs and charts might look impressive, but it won't capture the attention of a busy elected official.
When presenting your issue to an elected official, always keep in mind the need to reduce your message down to its most basic formulation. Be able to complete this sentence "Representative Smith, what this all boils down to is..........."
Finally, your message should give the elected official an action step. Tell them exactly what action you want them to take: "We need you to vote no on this resolution on March 19," or "We need you to call Representatives Taylor and Baker and ask them for their support on this issue."
By presenting a clear, compelling, and actionable message, you will be more persuasive and your elected official will know exactly what you are trying to achieve.
When Wellstone Action launched a national campaign to get Congress to pass the Paul Wellstone mental health fairness bill (a complex piece of legislation on a little-known subject) we made a clear and simple statement: discrimination against people with mental illness is wrong. We repeated that message over and over, with a simple tagline: pass the Wellstone bill. It was tempting to get mired in the details of the proposal, but decision-makers needed to hear a concise message that was framed as an issue of fairness and justice.