I talked to my small business counselor at the National Association for the Self Employed, and boy did he have a lot of great ideas... bear with me while i sort them all out.....
First of all, he said that there is nothing better than a hard copy letter. Phone calls are #3, emails #2, but hard copy letters HAVE to be recorded when the arrive at legislative offices....
so to that end, these were his suggestions: we should use common verbiage (and i think we already do), speak about how this will affect the micro and small home based businesses, and to stress that this is the only growing sector of the economy in America right now.
He suggested that we touch only lightly on how this will impact us personally, and rely more on the devastation this will cause as a whole.
He made another point that this was caused by legislation, and it will only change if there is a change in legislation. That's something concrete that we can ask for, instead of asking "what are you going to do" we tell them, "This is what we want, a change is legislation."
These are the people he suggested contacting:
your Reps and senators (he suggested FLOODING their mail boxes, if possible)
your local chamber of commerce (if you're a member)
National Chamber of commerce
Your local PTA- as this will affect books in the schools
Your local School Superintendent ( many of them aren't aware of this law)
Your local churches. (as it will affect materials for sunday school and such....)
Your local library.
The Small Business Administration, Office of Advocacy:
http://www.sba.gov/ADVO/He suggested to send letters/and or speak with these entities. And ending the letters with "I look forward to your response on the above matter."
If you go to this page on the NASE,
http://advocacy.nase.org/and put your zip code into the Media guide, it will give you all kinds of places to send emails or hard copies. you can only choose 5 at a time, but you can do it more than once, if you see more than 5 you want to contact.
I hope that helps some, i have a phone meeting with the Executive Director of the Legislative Offices for the NASE in Washington, DC tomorrow morning. Hopefully, i can get the NASE's advocacy group involved with this....
dody :)
