Letters to the Editor Party

	Materials and Resources Event registration page for your event Tips on writing Letters to the Editor Handout: "What is a MoveOn Council?" Event sign-in sheet One-stop-shop for health care campaign organizing materials Need help? Check with your Organizer or Regional Coordinator, or email Support Corps at: healthcareparty@moveon.org

We're in the middle of a historic campaign to win real health care reform. Holding a Letter to the Editor party is a great way to help get the word out in your local media outlets.

Here's a basic outline for your party.

Welcome & introductions (10 min)

• Even though some people may arrive late, we recommend starting the party within a few minutes of the time you said your party would begin. Make sure your potluck is laid out, and invite people to eat as they get settled!
• As people come in, encourage them to introduce themselves to someone they’ve never met (or make introductions yourself). You can also ask them to take on a helper role, including:
  • Greeter: Welcome people who come in late, and get them oriented.
  • Clean-up crew: Help clean up afterwards.
  • Set-up crew: Get the house ready for guests to arrive.
  • Sign-In person: One person can pass around the sign-in sheet and make sure everyone signs in.
  • Letter sender: Someone to send in letters after the party ends
• When you're ready to officially begin, take a quick moment to let your guests know why you're hosting and what personally motivated you to host. Then ask everyone else to BRIEFLY introduce themselves, answering the following questions:
  • What brought them to the party.
  • What (if anything) they have done with MoveOn before.
• Then, preview the agenda for your group, and go over what you hope to accomplish.

Hone Our Skills: (10 minutes)

• Spend 10 minutes reviewing these tips on writing Letters to the Editor. (You should print out a couple extra to pass around). You can go around and have a different person read each point. If you or another Council member has had success in the past writing Letters to the Editor, you should also ask them to share what has worked for them.
• You can check with your Field Organizer or Regional Coordinator for some up-to-date Talking Points on the health care fight. Here are some basic health care talking points you can adapt for your letters, with help from your Field Organizer or Regional Coordinator:
  • [STATE] is in the midst of a health care crisis: people are dying because they can’t get the car they need and health care costs are spiraling out of control. Health care reform with a public option will help bring down health care costs and expand health care coverage to millions of America’s families. [This is a good time to share a personal story-are you a small business owner struggling with health care costs? Do you have a health care horror story?]
  • Over 70 percent of Americans support a public option. But Insurance and HMOs are spending nearly $5 million per week to defeat health care reform, with a special focus on killing the public option. The insurance industry is using every trick in the book to protect their profits and kill health care reform.
  • It's time for Senators / Reps to do what is right for [STATE] families, and not the insurance industry, and [keep fighting for / stop blocking ] real health care reform with a strong public option.
• Review those before people jump into writing. Here are some You shouldn't copy them -- but you can consult them for guidance on what message we want to get across right now with your letter.

Write Our Letters: (30 minutes)

One thing that the tips sheet doesn't address, and probably the biggest challenge to getting our letters published, is not getting around to writing them! If we want to write something, but never get around to it, or if we start writing, but don't send it in, we aren't accomplishing our objective. The key is to just write -- even if the letter isn't perfect it's much better to send something than nothing. The best way to get over the hump and write a letter, is to just dive in.

So, for the next 30 minutes Council members write a letter. If someone is nervous about writing a letter alone, it's fine to pair up or work in small groups.

Some of the attendees unfamiliar with details of health care policy will undoubtedly want more resources and more information before writing. This is a great instinct and it's very important to educate ourselves thoroughly when preparing for an event, writing a longer opinion essay to the newspaper, or preparing for an interview with a reporter. Letters to the Editor, however, are a different sort of medium – they are short and intended as a tool to get public thoughts and opinions into the newspaper, not as a space where only policy experts are allowed to weigh in.

If you believe that we should respond to the health care crisis in this country by passing strong health care reform with a strong public option, that is absolutely enough for the basis of a letter. If some attendees still feel uncomfortable writing a letter, you can encourage them to pair up with others in the Council and then point them to some resources for when they get home.

Note: You can look up the address of the local newspaper online or call them and ask for it. If you can have envelopes handy, and people stuff the envelopes and address them at the party, it's a lot more likely that they will actually get sent (if you want to go the extra mile you can even collect all the addressed envelopes, and mail them yourself).