Recap on our Anti-SOPA Campaign: 15,000 Faxes Sent to Congress | Hacker News Reader

Recap on our Anti-SOPA Campaign: 15,000 Faxes Sent to Congress

blog.hellofax.com

I sent one of those.

I was surprised when I got an email the next day from my congressman thanking me for contacting them and promising a longer reply once they caught up on their backlog.

Whether they OCR'ed it or had some intern doing data entry, either way, they at least extracted my email address from the fax and emailed me, giving me the feeling someone noticed it.

What did the email say? Something like: Thank you for faxing us. Your fax is important to us. We are experiencing heavier than normal fax volume, and your fax will be answered in the order it was received.

I'm curious who uses HelloFax. There is a similar service (can't remember the name) that does the same thing for snail mail.

It seems like both have a strong advocacy product, either combined or separately. I can't imagine actually using these services in my day-to-day (but I may lack imagination), but I can definitely see where they could market it to large non-profits and NGO's.

Anyone from HelloFax who can speak to who their user base and thoughts of making advocacy part of the product?

And 15,000 faxes not read. Moreover 15,000 people thinking they did something useful, without having done anything useful at all.

In my interviews with Congressional staff who actually work on correspondence desks, they laugh at people sending faxes in and come right out and say that sending faxes, vs any other method of communications, is ineffective.

I understand that HelloFax wants to market itself. But this campaign does more harm than good.

I'll start OT by mentioning that the prior HN conversation I cite is apparently not yet indexed by Google -- WTF, Google, you used to be good and prompt at indexing HN content. (I subsequently found it with the HN search dialog, so good for that.)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3480712

Anyway, on the above-linked thread, there are some apparently informed comments to the effect that faxes are, well, effective. For example:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3481102

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3480952

However, I see from your profile, cjoh, that you also appear to be well-connected in this domain.

So, I'm not asking to be argumentative, but rather to refine my own and perhaps others' strategies for communicating with their Congress-persons, going forward. What works? What doesn't? And specifically why and how?

For my own part, and perhaps this is now somewhat dated, I understood -- well-written, individual -- faxes to be viewed as more akin to a letter, while arriving in a more timely fashion. That is, a constituent actually sitting down to write out a formal description of their concerns and reasoning and then taking the trouble to send it, typically (or historically?) more trouble than a "Send" button requires.

I guess fax processing may well be all-electronic, at this point, but my hope also lay a bit in perhaps generating a physical object within the office, as opposed to being just/yet one more message on a screen.

And I certainly wish to communicate more than just a "tick" and perhaps a ZIP code categorization in a phone call tally.

I'll typically write an individually addressed letter. I try not to be too long, but I may run to two -- perhaps even three -- pages to outline not just my concern by my reasoning. I try to write these in a top down, aka "newspaper", style, so that the most relevant statements and information can be gleaned in the first paragraphs, with further reasoning, detail, and documentation to follow.

Is this all for naught? Should I instead stick it in an envelop and hope that it gets through all the screening some claim is these days slowing down physical mail, in time to reach the Congress-person's office before a vote and before they are committed to a vote?

Any additional insight would be appreciated. And hopefully this is not too OT for HN.

P.S. I hope my comments on the original, announcement thread from HelloFax did not make the effort seem like a mere marketing ploy. I have no relationship with HelloFax other than being a customer and thinking that the fax campaign was a good idea.

Sorry I am late getting back on this. Long day!

I think the best thing I can do to explain this is to actually watch the video at http://informationdiet.com/live. It'll take you some time. I'm carving it up now.

But there's a lot in there.

The overarching theme though is that good persuasion is a function with two parameters: sacrifice, and effort. The more sacrifice and effort involved in your persuasion to Congress, the more likely it is to be well received. Thus, a visit to Washington, DC is much more effective than a phone call. A phone call is much more effective than an email. An email is much more effective than a form email. A form email is much more effective than a form fax. And so on.

Here are some tips:

http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/how-to-be-a-better-...

and

http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/how-to-talk-to-cong...

Thank you. I had an initial look the articles the other day, and I'll tackle the video this weekend.

Do the faxes get sent straight to a computer or printed out? If the former, I wouldn't expect anyone to care, but the latter, en masse, could surely cause some disruption. No?

cjoh,

I can tell from your profile page that you're active in this area and you probably know what's going on.

Rather than telling 15,000 people who made an honest effort that they haven't done anything useful, maybe you could suggest better ways to reach our leaders instead?

He made a valid point. Why is he downvoted?

I don't mind the downvotes. Some people like to downvote when they actually mean "disagree" -- happens all the time here in Washington.

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