Inviting Your Member of Congress

Now that you have a basic idea of what your event or meeting will look like and focus on—and you have contacted key officials from the school and city to gain their permission and participation—it’s time to invite your Member of Congress to attend. This section will help you understand the scheduling process and request your Member’s participation. In addition to the information provided below, we have two tools that you can adapt:

➢ TOOL: Sample invitation or meeting request. (Word format) This sample letter will help you develop your invitation or meeting request. It will help to have a copy of your completed Planning Worksheet (available in section 1).

➢ TOOL: Sample script for following up with the scheduler.  (Word format) Take this script and fill in information from your completed Planning Worksheet to develop your own personalized script to use when contacting the scheduler for your Member of Congress.

Obtaining Contact Information for your Member of Congress

Each individual and community is represented in the U.S. Congress by two Senators, who represent an entire state, and a Representative, who represents a “district” of approximately 650,000 people. We recommend focusing your efforts on your Representative as he or she is most familiar with your local community. Although in smaller states, you may have a greater chance of engaging your Senators than individuals in larger states. If your SRTS project affects multiple schools, there may be more than one Representative as well, so you should consider reaching out to each of them (although it will be challenging to get more than one Representative or Senator to one event.)

If you don’t already know which Member of Congress you should be contacting, please visit: http://www.congressmerge.com/onlinedb/index.htm. There you can either click on your state in the map to get a list of all the Members of Congress for your state, or enter the mailing address of the school where your SRTS project is taking place to get a list of your two Senators and the Representative for your area. If multiple schools are affected by your SRTS project, enter each address to see whether you should consider engaging multiple Members of Congress.

Once you have identified your local Representative at the CongressMerge website, click on the individual’s name to access more detailed information. For each Member of Congress, the website displays their Washington, DC address, phone and fax, and contact information for each of their district offices. Print this information out, as you will need it for the scheduling request.

Understanding the Scheduling Process

Members of Congress have extremely busy schedules that often book up well in advance. It is in your best interests to submit your event or meeting request at least a month in advance, six weeks in advance if possible. Keep in mind that Members get dozens of requests for appearances and meetings all in one day, so it may take a little persistence on your part to ensure that your scheduling request is accepted.

The key to getting on the schedule of a Member of Congress is to work with his or her scheduler, who is charged with arranging all of the Member’s meetings and events. Some Members even have two schedulers—one who handles events and meetings in Washington, DC and one who handles events back in the local district. The only way you will know who you should contact is by asking. Follow the steps outlined below to request your meeting or scheduler your event.

1. Call either the Washington, DC office or your local district office and let them know you are a constituent, and that you have a scheduling request for an event in your community and would like to know how to proceed. You will likely be asked to submit your request in writing, either via fax or email. Find out the name of the scheduler and his or her phone, fax and email so you can follow up. Some offices will prefer that all scheduling requests come to their Washington, DC office, while others will refer you to the appropriate district office for scheduling a local event. Once you have this contact information, you can proceed with drafting your scheduling request, submitting it, and following up on it.

2. At this point, you should draft your invitation or meeting request letter. Please refer to the Sample Invitation or Meeting Request tool for guidance on structuring this letter. Ideally, this letter should be from a prominent individual in your community, such as the mayor, the principal of the school, or the leader of a local business or nonprofit. At its most basic, your letter should communicate several key points:

• Who you are and what organization you represent
• Proposed date(s) and time(s). If you have any flexibility in when your meeting or event will take place, you’ll increase the likelihood of the Member’s acceptance if you have a couple of options.
• Length of the event or meeting
• Focus of the meeting or event
• The role the legislator will play (speaker, observer, etc.)
• Key attendees and their affiliations. Be sure to highlight in particular any community leaders that will be attending the event or meeting.
• Your contact information so the scheduler can follow up.

3. Fax or email your letter to the scheduler you identified in whichever format the office indicated. It’s important that you do use fax or email, as regular mail goes through a screening process that slows down delivery.

4. Wait a week. If you have not heard back from the scheduler, place a call to the scheduler to follow up on your request. Take a look at the Sample Script tool for more information on how to work with the scheduler.

5. If you are having trouble getting an answer on your scheduling request, see if any of your community leaders or partners have a relationship with the Member of Congress or someone on his or her staff. If so, provide them with a copy of your original letter and ask them to place a follow-up call as well to inquire about the status of your scheduling request.

6. Be persistent and check in regularly until you get an answer.

a. If the answer is that the Member of Congress cannot accommodate your request, the scheduler may offer you some alternatives. You will have to use your judgment and select the best option:

i. See if there’s an alternative time or date for your meeting or event that the Member could attend.
ii. If you’ve requested that he or she attend an event, see if you and your key partners can meet with the Member instead at a different time.
iii. The last resort would be to have a staff person for the Member of Congress attend your event or take your meeting. If this is the only alternative you are offered, take it as it still gives you a chance to start educating your legislator about SRTS. Once you’ve had the initial meeting or event with the staffer, you can always make a future request for an event or meeting with the Member of Congress.

b. If the answer is yes:

i. Confirm key details with the scheduler about the time and date of the event, the legislator’s role, and who you should be working with leading up to the event or meeting.
ii. If there will be the possibility of any media attending your event (see section 4 for more information on this), ask the scheduler if you should be working with their media staff person.
iii. Make sure the scheduler has your complete contact information, including a cell phone. A Member’s schedule may change at the last minute, so it’s important for the scheduler to be able to contact you on short notice.