QUICK ACTION PLAYBOOK:

Electrify Municipal Fleets

  • Urge your mayor or city council to electrify municipal vehicles by taking advantage of new federal tax credits.

    1. Find their contact info

    2. Send an email

    3. Ask a friend to do it too

1. Gather contact information

Every community is represented by elected officials. For this action, you’ll need to identify your mayor and city council member(s) and gather their contact information: email address, social media handles, and/or phone numbers.

America has over 19,000 municipalities, so there isn’t one central database of everyone’s local representatives.

  • For large cities and county officials: Use the usa.gov database. Larger cities have city council districts, so you’ll enter your address to first determine your district and then who represents that district. And if your city councilor or mayor doesn’t show up on usa.gov, Google: [name of your city/town] + mayor. That should yield an easy result.

  • For small towns: Google: [name of your city/town] + mayor/city council. Note: you may have a uniform town council that is not subdivided by district, so in that case, you can contact any city council member(s) you want!

Write down the contact information. Once you have the name of your mayor and one city council member, try to use the municipality’s official website to find:

  1. An email address

  2. Their office phone number

  3. Social media handle (preferably where they’re most active, otherwise your preferred channel)

2. Send a personalized email to your local officials

It might be tempting to sign your name to the bottom of a prewritten email, but personalized emails are much more attention-grabbing. They also get processed individually, whereas mass-produced letters are batched. Our Slack #wins-shoutouts channel is packed with celebratory posts from changemakers who sent personalized emails to their local officials and received awesome personal responses. It’s always worth it!

Click on the template below to open an editable email to your mayor and city councilor about this week’s featured climate solution (or manually copy and paste the template). You can use the same email copy for both, but send the emails separately. Please bcc advocacy@climatechangemakers.org so we can track our impact.

Make sure to customize the sections in brackets and carry over any links (they’re an important part of your message!), and save a copy of your email to use as a phone script. Then, return to this playbook.

⬇️ Template

3. Invite others to take action (don’t skip this!)

Network effects are powerful. Talking about climate solutions and encouraging friends, family, or followers to take climate action is a crucial step toward changing cultural norms and making real progress. Now that you’ve taken this action, invite your friends to do the same.

📲 Easy option: simply share this LinkedIn post or this Instagram post.

And that’s it, playbook complete! Feel accomplished.
Thank you for taking action.

🎉 CUE CONFETTI by clicking COMPLETE! 🎉

Want more action?
Go to the current Action Plan

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