Smart policy impact for busy people

MailOurGov.org

Smart policy impact
for busy people

Let your voice be heard.

Mail lots of persuasive letters to elected officials, in just a few minutes, and track their responses online.

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ABOUT

MAILING

WHAT’S NEXT

TRACK

ACCOUNT

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Here’s how it works. First, you use this handy web app to...

Pick an issue you care about

Choose and personalize one of our fact-based draft letters

...or write your own!

Select your mailing list from 12,000+ contacts in Congress and the White House (including staffers)

and

Order as many letters as you’d like for 49¢ each
(That’s at our costs: 22¢ for custom printing and 27¢ for pre-sorted first-class postage — this is a nonprofit initiative).

Next, we custom bulk print and mail your letters as postcards.

(They cost you less, and avoid DC quarantines.)

Then a unique code printed on each card leads your recipient to a personalized reply page

which they may not choose to use, but we’ll keep stats on them for you either way.

As usage grows, we’ll all have increasing impact on policy (think mailbags in Miracle on 34th Street), while collecting a big mountain of (anonymized) data about the views of concerned citizens and the actions of those who represent them — an invaluable public resource in coming elections.

Who knows? Maybe we can even help reason prevail in our public discourse!

A word on the scope of your influence: Many suggest that writing to anyone beyond your own Congressional delegation is a waste of time, since they’re the only ones who care about your vote. We’ve seen evidence that’s not the case. Especially if you live in a giver state (see our giver/taker analysis of America’s new taxation-without-representation problem for more details), you’re writing to the Administration, or you’re addressing Congressional Committee members on matters of national scope, your voice will be heard, thanks to the crisp “why read this?” messaging on your MOG letters.

Get Started

After 2,175 letters sent by a dozen beta users from across the country, here's a sample of what we're hearing:

“

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MailOurGov.org

Smart policy impact
for busy people

Let your voice be heard.

See Example

Mail lots of persuasive letters to elected officials, in just a few minutes, and track their responses online.

Get Started

Learn more...

HOME MAILING WHAT’S NEXT REPLY TRACK ACCOUNT Not {{ user.f_name }}? SIGN OUT SIGN IN ABOUT

Here’s how it works. First, you use this handy web app to...

Pick an issue you care about

Choose and personalize one of our fact-based draft letters

...or write your own!

Select your mailing list from 12,000+ contacts in Congress and the White House (including staffers)

and

Order as many letters as you’d like for 49¢ each
(That’s at our costs: 22¢ for custom printing and 27¢ for pre-sorted first-class postage — this is a nonprofit initiative).

Next, we custom bulk print and mail your letters as postcards (which cost you less, and avoid DC quarantines.)

Then a unique code printed on each card leads your recipient to a personalized reply page

which they may not choose to use, but we’ll keep stats on them for you either way.

Who knows? Maybe we can even help reason prevail in our public discourse!

Have we given you enough info to

Get Started ?

If not, please share some feedback so we can help.

After 2,175 letters sent by a dozen beta users from across the country, here's a sample of what we're hearing:

“

{{ quote.source }} ({{ quote.state }})

Mailing {{ mi.i + 1 }} of {{ o.mailing_count }}

Whether you want to state a well-supported position to your intended recipients, or just ask a town-hall kind of question, slotting your message into one of these categories will help organize tracking data — for both direct responses to your letters as well as congressional voting stats.

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Feel free to add a new one to address. We'll slot it into a category later and offer your argument (if you approve) for others to use.

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Feel free to add a new one to address. We'll slot it into a category later and offer your argument (if you approve) for others to use.

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Feel free to add a new one to address. We'll slot it into a category later and offer your argument (if you approve) for others to use.

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Issue: {{ mi.issue_txt }}

Our suggested letters follow activist best practices in writing to elected officials. The only part that really requires your input is personal impact, an example of which is highlighted below. Make that your own story (about one tweet worth), to avoid the form-letters-get-ignored problem, and you’re all set.

Feel free to edit the rest, but note your word count — there’s limited room on the postcard.

Activist organizations provide clear guidance for communicating with your elected officials. We’ve included it in our letter structure below, but you can hide the framework if you want to go free-form.

It’s your postcard. Write whatever you’d like!

We do recommend considering activists' best practices in communication to elected officials, if your goal is productive engagement on an issue. [You can get guidance on good persuasive-essay form via the Use framework button below.]

Please be civilized and keep the moral high ground with your language choices.

To stay legible on the postcard, your text shouldn’t exceed about 250 words.

{{ ( mi.frame ? 'Hide' : 'Use') }} framework

{{ ( a.in_l_notes ? 'Hide' : 'Show') }} instructions

Word count: {{ a.word_count }} (250 recommended target)

{{ a.letter_parts[0].lbl }} Note: these blue labels won't be printed on your cards.

( we’ll fill in these first two for you — see details below )

{{ prt.notes }} common fallacies. This is the heart of the matter.

[ your name ] (we’ll fill this in, too.)

Where’s the Save button? Just like Google docs, we’re saving your work in the cloud frequently in the background (in this editing interface and throughout the site), so no worries if you spend some quality time on your letter and list selection and your browser meets with some calamity. Just open the same browser, come back to the site, and click “yes” if you want to pick up where you left off.

Resources

Our Favorite Activist Organizations

The most impressive and well thought-out approach to bringing sanity — and the will of the majority — back to our politics is being catalyzed across the country by the team behind the Indivisible movement. Their advocacy of local action targeted at the Congressional delegation who cares about your votes makes a ton of sense. We think MOG’s enablement of participation by the broader segment of folks with very limited time left over in life — after work and family obligations are taken care of — is an excellent complement to their efforts.

We’ve also been inspired by the team at thesixtyfive.org, which is worth a visit if you’d like to make some phone calls as well. They share solid, informed perspectives on what makes for good correspondence with your delegation.

There are many others . . . we’ll collect more resources as we get this rolling.

Guidance on Correspondence

If you’re going to take the time and energy to put a piece of physical mail in the hands of your elected representatives, it’s worth taking advantage of the more substantitive nature of the medium to engage in an equally substantative manner on the issues. While the bulk-mail economies of our postcards can be used in many ways, we believe the thinking-people class that is alarmed by the turn our country has taken will be best served (and most gratified) by making a constructive contribution to the discourse. If you’re writing your own piece, rather than using one of our pre-fab suggested letters, here’s a good recipe to follow:

{{ prt.lbl }}: {{ prt.notes }} common fallacies. This is the heart of the matter.

If this sounds daunting, relax. A bit of web browsing with your critical-thinking hat on will yield multiple reasonable sources who’ve written well-founded arguments on the major issues (the The Economist is an excellent resource, for one), and then all you have to do is distill that fact base and logic down to your own take on it. And remember, we can only print 250 or so words on the postcard legibly, so this needn’t be a long treatise.

Other Details

As you’ll see in the next step, we’ve collected and categorized a healthy database (more than 12,000 strong) of elected representives and their staff. Our interface allows you to select easily from a number of different approaches to distributing your letter, from a narrow focus on your own state and district’s Congressional delegation, to committees, taker states, the White House crew, and potentially very large populations of Congressional and committee staff from which you can pull a random sample. Unless you’ve opted for the framework-free mode, we’ll tailor your intro lines on each postcard to the specific recipient’s category and your relationship with that class. The salutation is standard title and last name, or first name if a staffer. The opening will be one of these variations, based on the intended recipient:

I write as a...

concerned voter in your

state

district

senator's state [if staffer]

representative's district [likewise], or...

voter concerned about an issue relevant to your work on the [House/Senate committee name] committee

[giver state name] taxpayer who’s funded $1,234 of Federal expenditures in [taker state name] since 2012

concerned voter and taxpayer regarding an issue of nationwide importance and impact

You'll see how these appear with your customized letter on your cards, given your addressee selections, in the Review step.

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re: {{ mi.issue_txt }}

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Feel free to choose a large range of contacts (which we know is tempting to do). The last of the Congress Filters below will let you bring this back within your budget by taking a random sample from among your complete selection, including the administration.

When you’ve completed this list it’ll be helpful to give it a short description that summarizes its coverage, for future reference:

The Administration

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Congress

DoneEditing

Got it.

Congress Filters

The 9 tools below will help you pick the right subset of the 12,486 people working in Congress. Explore them all to see what’s possible.

Congressfolk care a lot about getting re-elected, so they pay the most attention to their own constituents. That makes your delegation worth including on your list.

If you give us your home address, we’ll look up your congressional district and delegation for you. You can share it from your account on Amazon in a couple easy steps (which you'll need to do to place an order anyway):

Address from

Use This Address

transferring info

Address transferred from Amazon.

Or, you can give us the essentials here anonymously for now:

Get district

Getting district from our geodata service.

( this will take a few seconds )

Sorry, but your information didn’t resolve to a district. Please double check your entries and try again.something went wrong in the communication with our geo database partner. Please mash the Get district button again to give it another try.

District {{ user.district }}

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Please help us identify your delegation by providing your address in the first panel.

To enlist more support for your request, sending copies to the senior staff of your senators and representatives is also helpful. They care a lot about their bosses’ re-election, too.

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The House and Senate committees address issues on behalf of the entire country — so your relevant concerns deserve committee members’ attention regardless of your district.

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To select one or more specific members of congress by name, (for example, who you know are prominent in discussions of your specific issue), search by last name here:

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Our first four filters help you follow established best practices for communication with your elected officials under normal circumstances.

Since current circumstances are far from normal, we also offer another approach that equips you to take broader action.

With the next five filters, you can select a list based on chamber, role, affiliation, state, giver/taker status, and random sample size (to contain costs). For example: a sample of Republican Senators and their senior staff from the taker states:

Start your broader sample by including contacts in one or more of these roles, then narrow the selection as desired with the party and state subset tools to the right.

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The 34 ‘taker’ states receive more in Federal expenditures in all forms than their residents and private enterprises contribute to the Federal budget annually. Taxpayers in the 16 net ‘giver’ states subsidize them by a total of ~$425 billion each year (see more details).*

Since you live in a giver state, ifIf you live in a giver state (which you can check here) and you provide us a total figure for the amount of Federal taxes you’ve paid over the past five years (which of course we will never share with anyone in whole form), we’ll calculate the amount you’ve contributed to each taker state and highlight that figure in a special note on your letter, suggesting that taker-state congressfolk owe you a moment of their attention as a result. We'll track and publicize their responses, naturally.

Your 5-year Federal tax total
(no alternative facts, please):

* Based on IRS and Council of State Governments data from FY2015, the latest available.

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Edit selection on map above

Note that manual selections override other filters. You can...

clear manual selections

to get a fresh start.

Clicking a state cycles through three modes:
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If you've gone for broad reach in your selection but in the process surpassed what you want to spend, we offer the option of a random sample. You can reach all the categories you'd like and track their responses, but within your budget. Just tell us your limit, and we'll pick a sample for you from the selection you've made.

Mailing limit: $

You can review the list before checkout and revise/resample as you wish.

Note also that if you’d prefer a combination of discrete choices for one or more categories and a random sample for others, you can do that by sending the same letter in two different mailings (via the Order page).

The list tool is loading . . . a moment, please.

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The aggregation of your mailing list selections appears below.

Click or tap the s to preview contact-specific letter texts.

Resample to generate a new random list

Approve this list and letter after your review to proceed to the order step

The Administration

Staff:

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Staff:

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{{ stf.posttext }}

Members of Congress and Staff

Staff:

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{{ cont.posttext }}

Staff:

{{ stf.f_name }} {{ stf.l_name }} {{ stf.ttl }}, {{ stf.aff }}, {{ stf.st }}
{{ stf.posttext }}

Congressional Committee Staff

Staff:

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{{ cont.posttext }}

Staff:

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{{ stf.posttext }}

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Your Current Order: {{ o.mailings.length }} mailings, {{ o.pieces_ttl }} letters, ${{ o.order_ttl | number : 2 }} total cost

Please remember to indicate your preferences for publishing your letters on the site for others to use, using DC or in-state addresses for congressfolk and their staffers, and for sending a sample postcards to yourself (so you can see first-hand what your selected contacts are getting on the other end of this process).

Edit

Current

Mailing {{ mlng_i + 1 }}

Issue

Letter

publish, as first name, last initial, or anon (for others to use)

List

Address

For congressfolk & staff, send to DC or in-state offices

Contacts

{{ mlng.contacts_count }} + mail one to yourself

Cost

${{ mlng.total_p | number : 2 }}[ mailing not yet reviewed and approved ]

Add another mailing

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Totals	Description
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${{ o.printing_ttl \| number : 2 }}	Printing cost at our partner’s facility in Massachusetts ({{ a.price_m_print }}¢ ea.)
{{ a.order_cost \| number : 2 }}	Order costs (for Amazon)
{{ o.sales_tax \| number : 2 }}	Sales Tax, if you live in CA or MA
{{ o.postage_ttl \| number : 2 }}	Postage — USPS pre-sorted first-class rates ({{ a.price_m_mail }}¢ ea.)
${{ o.order_ttl \| number : 2 }}	Total Order Cost

This total comprises only direct service costs from our printer (who is working with us at helping-the-cause rates), AWS, and the USPS, plus applicable sales taxes as required by law (yes, even for nonprofits).

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Depending on where you live, how much you pay in taxes, and your position on the left-right spectrum, the following information may make you angry.

America has a significant taxation-without-representation problem. Straightforward analysis of publicly-available information from the IRS and the Council of State Governments shows that in FY2015 (the latest year for which complete information is available), 16 “giver” states contributed $425 billion more in Federal taxes than these states received in Federal expenditures (in all forms). This cash was redistributed to 34 “taker” states, who contributed less in taxes than they received.

You can see state-by-state details below.

The “without representation” part of the problem becomes obvious when you look at the balance of our nation’s government along the left-right (blue-red) spectrum — and in absolute numbers — for the giver states vs. the taker states. The following charts speak for themselves. A key part of MailOurGov’s goal is to help bridge this obvious gap through easier (and closed-loop) communication with taker-state delegations who consume those redistributed tax dollars and set nationwide policies that profoundly affect giver-state voter’s lives.

Out of curiosity, we also looked at the giver-taker profile of party affiliation and average education level, state by state, with very illuminating results. The R² of a regression through either affiliation as a function of education level is 0.47, which means education (or the absence thereof) explains about half of what’s going on. We include this profile here without further comment.

State-by-State Details

The first profile is of the absolute dollar amounts of each state’s Federal taxes paid minus Federal expenditures received (of all kinds) in FY2015, yielding tax surpluses, or net outflows, on the right for the givers, and tax deficits on the left (inflows) for takers.

Net
Outflows ($B)

The second profile recasts the net cash outflows and inflows above as a percentage of each state’s total Federal tax payments. To illustrate how to interpret the percentages, Delaware, for example, contributes 55.8% of their taxes to the taker states, with just 44.2¢ of each $1 of tax paid coming back to Delaware. New Mexico gets back $3.34 for every $1 they pay.

Net
Outflows
(as a % of
taxes paid)

Please feel free to contact us with any comments or questions about these analyses.

If you live in a giver state, you can do something about this by sending lots of persuasive letters to taker-state delegations and their staffs.