ACTION PLAYBOOK
Contact Your State Legislators
Effectively encourage your state legislators to enact transformative climate policy.
Step 1: Gather contact information for your state senator(s) and representative.
Enter your address in the usa.gov database. Click “State Officials” and locate your state senator(s) and state assembly member (also called state representative or delegate in some states).
⚠️ If you live in Nebraska, Guam, or the U.S. Virgin Islands, you will only see one representative in the state legislature. If you live in Washington D.C., you do not have a state legislature, so pick a state where you formerly lived or have close ties.
Write down the contact information for each legislator’s:
Phone Number
Social media handle (preferably where they’re most active, otherwise your preferred channel)
You may have to click through to their official website to find all the contact info!
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Create a new contact for each of your county officials. Include their office phone number, email address, website, and social media. This will make it so much simpler to contact them in the future.
While you’re at it, follow them on social media, and look for a “Subscribe to my Newsletter” option on the official website. Receiving their content in your feed & inbox on a regular basis will make you an infinitely more effective advocate. You’ll get a sense of their priorities, get the chance to meet them at community events, and learn about new issues to contact them about.
Step 2: Get to know their priorities & record on climate action.
To be the most effective advocate possible, you need to build an authentic relationship with your elected officials. And no, this is not just for fancy donors or political operatives. State legislators are shockingly accessible, and they genuinely want to get to know their constituents.
Relationship-building starts by learning more about them. When you know what issues they care about and their history of climate action, you can tailor your outreach to resonate with them personally.
Follow this worksheet to research your state legislators.
Pro tip: Save the file to your computer so you can add to it over time. Build it out with research on other elected officials, and update it as you learn new information.
Step 3: Send personalized emails to your state legislators
It might be tempting to sign your name to the bottom of a completely prewritten email, but personalized emails are much more attention-grabbing. They also get processed individually, whereas mass-produced letters are batched. It’s always worth it!
Use the issue-specific Writing Guides below to craft an email to your state legislators.
Tips & reminders:
Customize the sections in brackets - or more if you’re up for it!
Send a unique email to each elected official, tailoring it to their unique priorities as much as possible.
Save a copy of your email text to use as a phone script in the next step
Step 4: Call them
Next, call the number(s) you found in Step 1, using your email from the previous step as a script. If you’re nervous, just remember that your reps and their staff are fellow humans. They’re also professionals being paid to listen to you! Your job here is to convey your authentic concern about an issue – you do not need to be an expert.
If they don’t pick up, don’t worry—your voicemail will be documented. And if you prefer to leave a voicemail rather than talk to a real person, call after hours.
Step 5: Tag your state legislators on social media
Onward! Making your ask publicly has the power to grab the attention of policymakers and elicit a response. Elected officials are sensitive to public perception, so they take note of what their constituents say in public. Also, some policymakers run their own social media accounts, so you may even reach some of them directly with your post. You can even try sliding into their DMs!
Use the template below to start a post, customizing everywhere you can, while being sure to preserve the specific ask and tag their handles.
Step 6: Now that you’ve taken action, invite your friends to do the same (don’t skip this!)
You (and only you!) have the power to influence certain people around you to take action. To make the greatest impact possible, we have to get comfortable talking about climate action with friends – even if they say, “No thanks, not today.” It’s how we 2x, 5x, or even 10x our impact on the issues we care most about. More people taking action = more public pressure for climate solutions.
📲 For an easy option, start with a social media post. Start from scratch, or repost from Climate Changemakers (@theclimatevote) with your own commentary on Instagram, BlueSky, or LinkedIn. You can do this in writing, or better yet, in a quick selfie video. The algorithms love video.
Whether you’re drafting from scratch or reposting with commentary, here’s an effective message arc:
🤓 What did you learn: I just learned that [insert most interesting factoid].
❤️🔥 Why do you care: This is really [emotional adjective like ‘exciting’ or ‘worrying’] because [why do you feel that way].
✅ What did you do: I just contacted my state legislator who represents me in [your state capitol], which was honestly way less intimidating and way more empowering than I thought it would be.
❓ Invitation/Call to Action: If any of my people in [places where this is relevant] want to do this with me, here’s a step-by-step playbook: https://www.climatechangemakers.org/preview-contact-your-state-legislator
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Take this step to the next level by reaching out to a friend who lives in the district of a state legislator who you think needs a nudge.
To make it as easy as possible for your friend, you can even “ghostwrite” for them. Just do this playbook again as if you were your friend and deliver them a ready-to-send email, phone number to call, and social media post to amplify. The more people get involved, the stronger the public pressure. The more targeted the public pressure, the more likely we are to succeed.
A different strategic approach is to choose someone who lives in a place where the issue is hot. Picture a scenario where you live in Berkeley, CA, and the neighboring city of San Francisco hasn't yet banned fossil gas in new buildings. You also just read that in Salem, Oregon, a city council vote on this issue is imminent. In this case, your San Francisco friends can wait—text that Salem bestie immediately!
Step 7: Report back
If you haven’t heard back in a week, follow up! A friendly nudge, just checking in that they received your email and the resources, is totally appropriate and often appreciated.
If you receive a response from your state legislators, please share it with advocacy@climatechangemakers.org. You can simply forward email responses or send a screenshot. This enables us to more accurately track our collective impact.
Did they seem skeptical? Anything you learn from your legislator’s response is valuable—including barriers to action. We’re trying to grease the wheels for deploying climate solutions, so the more we know, the more effective we can become as connectors and advocates.
Did you get an enthusiastic response from your state legislator? Awesome! In addition to forwarding to the Climate Changemakers staff, consider sharing your response publicly in our epic Slack #wins-shoutouts channel — other changemakers may find it motivating, and it may inspire more action-taking! We’re normalizing civic action on climate, and it starts with talking about it.
And that’s it, playbook complete! Feel accomplished.
Thank you for taking action.
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