ACTION PLAYBOOK
Meet with Your Member of Congress: Part 1
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Urge a member of congress to support a climate policy priority by meeting fact-to-face (virtually) with them or their staff.
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Complete the training
Choose who to meet with
Submit a scheduling request
Recruit others to join you
Begin preparing for the meeting
1. Start with a speed training
Constituent meetings with members of Congress can be intimidating at first, but they don’t have to be! The more you know about what to expect on a video call with congressional staff, the easier you’ll breeze through your first meeting.
You and those you recruit to join you do not require any prior experience, and someone on Climate Changemakers staff will fully equip you to go in prepared. The first step in that preparation is completing the constituent meeting training linked below. Please complete the training if this will be your first meeting with Climate Changemakers, even if you’ve participated in constituent meetings with other organizations.
2. Select a member of Congress and a policy priority
First, you’ll decide which of your members of Congress you want to meet with about the featured policy priority (or if you’d like to choose a different climate solution, browse our federal Issue Briefings). If you’re not familiar with your members of Congress, start here.
How to choose a member of Congress to meet with:
If you’re generally familiar with who represents you but don’t know who to choose, you can also use the tracker below to check whether other changemakers have recently met with your members of Congress. If there was a recent meeting with one of your reps, you might want to try a different lawmaker so we can cover more ground! If you’re meeting with someone that changemakers met with a while ago, it could be a good idea to follow up on the topics raised by the previous group.
If you do not see your elected official in the tracker, choose whichever member of Congress you wish, they just need to represent the congressional district where you live.
3. Submit a scheduling request
Once you have both a member of Congress and a policy priority in mind, it’s time to request your meeting. There are three ways to go about this:
Email an existing contact: If you’ve already corresponded with someone in the office, reach out to them directly in what is typically the fastest scheduling method.
Submit a webform: Many members of Congress will have a meeting request form on their website, as shown in the example below. Poke around on their site to find one.
Call the office: If you don’t have a contact already and can’t find a request form, call the Washington, DC office during ET business hours and say you are a constituent who would like to request a meeting with staff on energy issues.
4. Recruit 1–5 fellow changemakers to join your future meeting
Join the Climate Changemakers Slack and head to #action-constituent-meetings and the regional channels. This is where all of our constituent meeting organizing happens! Let the channels know who you plan to meet with and on what climate policy. See if anyone is interested in joining! A small group can add presence to your meeting. Plus, advocacy is just more fun with friends. Reminder: at the very least, someone on Climate Changemakers staff will always be available to join your meeting. You and those you recruit do not require any prior experience.
Have friends or neighbors who would want to join? Awesome! Send them a text or email now. You can invite them to the Climate Changemakers Slack using this link and share the playbook directly using this link. Or collaborate offline to prepare for your future meeting with a staffer.
5. Begin preparing your meeting outline
Most of the meeting preparation work will happen in a Google Doc. Click on one of the templates below to start building your meeting outline (the click here button allows you to generate your own copy of the document). After you create the new document, bookmark it! This will be home base for your constituent meeting prep.
Note: The templates include asks for both the House and Senate, so you will need to tailor the document to match your selected member of Congress.
Ready to start personalizing the template? Perfect! Open Part 2 of this action for a list of helpful resources and details on all things preparation-mode.
Boom! Your future constituent meeting is officially underway!
That’s a big deal.
When you’re ready, it’s time for you to prepare.
Next in this series: