Which Phrases Are More Effective When Communicating with Elected Officials?

[MineralMan]

21. Here's why: Each Congressional Representative has

between 500,000 and 800,000 people in his or her district. You are one of those. Depending on the district, more or less people will want to communicate with their representative during any given time period. Automated messaging and automatic responses are necessary to deal with the number of communications each receives.

Some people will not be satisfied with those responses. For them, some digging is required to find a better way to communicate. It's a filter. Only those serious enough about actually getting a message through will do the digging. Even then, the numbers are too large for a personal response to every communication by the representative. More filtering is needed to whittle the number down until it is manageable. What filters are used to do that depend on the individual representative. For many, it involves whether the person has contributed or volunteered during the previous campaign. Right or wrong, those are the people the representative doesn't want to piss off.

In this filtering process, lots of computer power is employed. That leads to errors, as always. So, you get a form letter about the wrong subject sometimes, or they have your phone number connected to the wrong address. Stuff happens that way. Much of the filtering is done automatically, using whatever algorithms that are available. Other filtering is done by junior staff members, many of them unpaid interns. What gets by the algorithms and low-level staff gets passed along to more senior staff. Eventually, a certain percentage of the communications actually reach the representative. Some of those get a personal response. Most get a one or two word note, and a staff member sends some appropriate pre-fab letter.

The problem is numbers and time. Half a million or more people to represent and not much time to devote the the task of answering letters and emails. So, there's a system. I can tell you absolutely that quality of content in any communication you send is one of the criteria. If your communication manages to get to the senior staff level, whether the representative sees it or not can depend on how well it is written. And yes, neatness, grammar, spelling, and punctuation count, as they always do.