How to Contact Your Public Officials

When to use this resource: 

You want your elected leaders to address an issue, but you don’t know who they are or how to reach them 

Outline of resource: 

1. Who do you want to reach? 
2. Best method to contact them
3. What to say 

Key points: 

• Direct outreach to public officials can help answer questions, solve small problems, and better understand the path towards making bigger changes 
• Understanding the basic structure of government will help you know who to contact

Government impacts our lives every day in ways big and small – fixing potholes, deciding tax rates, and funding social programs. But the reality is that most people don’t know who their congresspeople are, much less their state legislators, mayors, council members, or school board members, or how to get in touch with them. The sense that government is a black box leaves many of us feeling helpless when it comes to simple everyday questions. The good news is that, while government can be complicated, the basic information you need to reach out is readily available. With a few quick steps, you can figure out who can solve the problem, how to reach them, and what to say to get things done. 

1. Who do you want to reach? 

Anytime you encounter a problem or have an idea for improvements, you should start by asking yourself: who has the power to handle this? You’d love to see a pollinator garden at the park down the street – who manages that park? Is it a local park, a county park, or state park? Knowing what level of government (local, county, state, or federal) is in charge of handling the issue will help you get answers faster. But, if you aren’t sure, often reaching someone related to the issue at the wrong level of government is better than not reaching out at all, and they’ll likely be able to direct you to who to go to next. 

You should also consider the key positions in government that do that work. For issues related to maintenance and enforcement, reaching the executive branch of the government (your mayor, governor, etc) is the best bet. For issues related to policy choices, funding, etc, you should reach out to the legislative branch of the government (town council, county board of commissioners, state legislature, congress). Elected officials are typically the easiest to find and reach, but if you do a little extra digging on your government’s website, you may be able to determine more precisely who does that work. Here are a list of some common departments, boards and commissions at each level of government, although keep in mind that the exact names and breakdown will vary from place to place: 

• Municipal (local) government: police/fire department; parks department; transportation department/parking authority; human/social services department; environmental commission/green team; planning board; zoning board; housing authority
• County government: transportation department; library system; parks department; public safety department
• State government: department of environment, department of education, department of labor, department of consumer affairs

Once you have a general sense of what level and part of government to reach, you need to figure out who fills those positions in your area. A simple online search is a good way to start. Particularly for larger government bodies, search results are typically accurate (make sure you click on the official “.gov” site for the government) and websites are regularly updated. This isn’t always the case for smaller bodies – want to reach the “community arts commission” in your small town, but their webpage looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2009? Better reach out to the mayor’s office first, and they’ll send you to the right person from there. 

2. Best method to contact them 

Depending on who you’re trying to reach, there may be multiple ways to get their attention, including: 

• Website contact form
• Constituent services app
• An “info@” email
• A direct email address for that person
• Office or individual phone number
• Social media (for the government entity as a whole or for some elected officials, their own official pages or accounts) 
• In-person conversation at a government meeting or office building.

Which form of contact you decide to utilize first depends on a few things: 

• How urgently do you need a reply? 
• Is it easier to talk through a problem, or write it out where you can include links to supporting documents? 
• Are you trying to reach just one person, or multiple people on the same issue? 
• Might you want to directly share out the response to other interested people? 
• Do you want to have a documented reply so you can follow up on it later or have a record of the interaction? 

Phone calls and in-person conversations are best when you need an urgent reply, have a complicated issue, or have a lot of questions that you’d need answered to determine your next steps. Direct emails are best if you want to include links or attachments, create a thread with multiple people, forward the responses you receive, or document the outreach. 

You can also use multiple forms of contact, especially if you don’t get a timely response to your initial query. You might start with a phone call, then follow up with an email, then attend a government meeting or visit the office building to follow up again if you still haven’t gotten a response. Or you might start off by speaking during public comment at a government meeting, then follow up with an email or call later on based on the response you get in the moment. 

3. What to say 

This depends in part on how much time and effort you want to put into the outreach, and how much attention is required to get your core message across effectively. If you’re emailing your state legislator about a hot-topic bill that they’ll be voting on soon, they’re probably getting a lot of input – the most important thing to get across is what bill number you’re concerned with, whether you want them to vote yes or no, and a quick explanation of why you care about it. If it’s a lesser known issue that they might not have much education on, take more time to state the facts of the issue, link to credible sources, and share a personal story on why you care. If you’re concerned about a general topic and want to know what your city government is doing about it, consider what you’d like them to be doing and line up a few specific questions, but be more open-ended to gather more insight. 

To convince a public official to take a specific action, consider this basic logical structure: 

• What is the problem you’d like them to address 
• What is the solution you’re advocating for 
• Why you care
• Why they should want to act
• Why now is the time to act

Here are some simple templates you might use to apply this structure in a phone call or email. 

If you want to convince your public officials to take action on an issue that’s important to you, here are a few other ways you can get your message across: 

• Ask for a meeting and lobby them 
• Write a letter to the editor calling on them to act 
• Speak up during the public comment period at a public meeting