 Hi to everyone. My name is Allison. I'm with the Center for Election Science. I am one of their national advocacy coordinators. I've done a lot of work with some of you all in the chapter program and I've been in contact with Nate and as a lot of you all may have seen, he's run a pretty successful letter to the editor campaign and it's like one of the tools that hopefully everyone can utilize if you're stuck, if you'd like to get unstuck in your campaigns or just like a really good thing to have in your toolbox if you want to do like legislative days of action or get the attention of a lawmaker or even a journalist in particular. I think these are just like really good things to have. So, Nate, would you mind taking it away? Yeah, so, hey everyone and thanks for coming today. As Allison said, I'm Nate and I run Utah Proves. That's our effort in Utah just to get approval voting passed across the state. So today we're just going to talk a little bit about letter to the editors or LTEs. So this past year in Utah we were able to get several letter to the editors published across various papers within the state and after today we're hoping we can pass what helped us be successful to other campaigns and also help share some of the feedback we received to help you guys be even more successful than we've been. So just to start off at a couple questions for everyone. So first can someone tell me what a letter to the editor is and what your knowledge of them is? It's a submission to the editorial page on the newspaper. Yeah, so an LTE is where readers of the paper and I'll note usually you'll have to indicate that you live within the target audience or at very least the state to submit and then you can submit a short piece around 200 to 500 words on a specific topic to be published in the next paper. So then my next question is why are these important for the efforts like the ones that we're trying to run? It draws attention to issues but I also have found because I've written a lot of letters to the editor that my elected officials read them and it's one of the ways to give them a sense of what their constituency, what's important to their constituencies. Yeah, that is exactly right. So LTEs can be important for many reasons and those reasons can depend on what type of effort you're running. So for instance if you're running a ballot initiative, LTEs are very essential to get out the information about your effort, about the measure itself and also just to expose the idea to active voters especially since active voters are usually the ones reading the paper. And then if you're running... Oh sorry, is there legitimacy things or I don't know how hard it is to get a letter to the editor to submit or you know published? Is there part of it, part of it's that is that it seems more official than a blog post? Yeah, so I'll go over some of the things that will help the chances of getting that published but letter to the editors are usually just able to be submitted by anybody. Op-eds usually require you to indicate some type of like expertise on the topic you're discussing. So that's where you know someone who's a little bit more of an expert would write in but an LTE is just for anybody to submit. So then the next instance I wanted to talk about was like if you're running an initiative like we are here in Utah where the path of getting the legislation passed is only going to go through the legislative body rather than through the voters. And in that case LTEs become an essential way to get the attention of key legislators or council members whether that's to show them that support exists out in the public or just to create a public call to action for them so that they know you know their constituents have read that as well and then they're more inclined to listen to it. So first I want to talk a little bit about the role of LTEs in this circumstance and then I'll get a little bit more on to if it's a ballot initiative later. So you might be thinking will the legislators even see the letter to the editors? Do they care? And the answer is, as Nancy said, they do read them and they really do care but there are some important things to include to increase your chances of them seeing it and then responding in any kind of way. So the first important thing is to mention your target by name. We'll go into how to choose your target a little bit later. So for instance your state representatives or state senators they're going to have somebody or a team of people on their staff whose job it is to find any mention of them in the media. So they do this to stay out in front of news stories that they could be questioned about to be able to address something they know constituents just read about and also as a way to just to know where the public stands on key issues that they deal with. So you'll want to include this somewhere near the end of your LTE which includes the next part that I'm going to focus on which is the call to action and I'm going to give an example of combining these here in a second. So the call to action is basically what you're asking your audience or your target to do. So after you've discussed the legislation in the LTE your effort maybe some benefits of it in the same sentence that you mentioned your target you also want to ask them to consider this legislation to vote yes on it or whatever you decide the most effective call to action will be. So I'm going to paste in here a paragraph from one of our letter to the editors and you can just kind of see how we went about this. So this is one of the ones that I wrote and you can just see here at the end I strongly urge my representative Paul Ray and the rest of the legislature to give Utahns a chance to see how other methods work and then only choose the best one. So what we were asking we narrowed in on what our target was so that was representative Paul Ray and then the rest of the legislature if they are reading and then we give them the call to action which is asking them to consider the options. So for our circumstance we're trying to get them to consider approval voting to add on to an existing pilot program for ranked choice voting in the state. Okay so I'm just going to stop there for a second. Does anyone have any questions so far or anything like that? I was going to suggest what was covered naming the representative by name. John did you have something? Well yeah I assume you put the letter in the chat and you're not screen sharing and are we seeing the whole letter just to tell you the ending. That's right so this is just the ending. I will paste a few links of various ones that we got published for you guys to see the whole letters later but this is just the ending for one of them. Okay all right so let's move on to the next part and okay so then this is a focus so far on if your target was like a legislator or a council member or something like that mentioning them specifically by name but what if your target is a constituency what if it's the voters rather than elected officials then you want to change that mention to a little bit more broad so you want to say something like I strongly urge my fellow voters to to consider voting yes on this ballot initiative or something like that. So let's talk a little bit about the principles of a letter to the editor and what the process of actually writing one is like and then if we have time I just want to go through and have everyone kind of go through the beginning process of getting this started and we'll just try to get a few examples. So the first thing that we want to do is we want to figure out where we're going to submit the letter to the editor. So this is pretty much as simple as a google search. You probably already have a good idea of which big papers and publications are in your state and which ones are important. So usually it's as simple as looking up something like the name of the publication and then submit LTE so I'm just gonna for instance we have Deseret news here in Utah so you would just look up something like this Deseret news submit LTE and for me the first result is actually the submission link which is really helpful. You can do this for most publications. Now another thing to consider too is to look for papers and publications that you may not have heard of that are still within your state. So ones that may not pull up initially when you look up publications or papers in your state or like university papers or ones for specific cities things like that. So you just want to spend maybe five ten minutes just looking up all of the possible papers that you could submit to just getting an idea of where you can submit and then so what I want you guys to do right now we're just going to take about three minutes and I just want everyone to go online and just try to find a few places where you can submit LTEs and then just make a list with the names and the links so that you can have this when you're ready to submit an LTE. It's just a useful resource to have so we'll just take a few minutes and then come back. So go ahead. And I'll keep the time Nate. Just a reminder that's just to identify some newspapers for you all from this like three or so minutes. How big of a factor should the size of a newspaper be and whether or not we choose to submit an LTE there? For instance the biggest paper in Colorado is the Denver Post. Would it maybe make sense to aim somewhat lower or anything like that? So I think one of the best strategies is to aim for all levels if you can. So the big ones are obviously key because you're reaching the biggest constituencies but if you're doing something like a university paper then that gives you the ability to kind of tailor your language to them specifically. Try to let them know what the benefits are for them and give them a specific call to action. So there can be benefits for any size of paper that you're submitting to but I would definitely encourage people to submit to all the papers that you can. Also what do you think of copying and pasting an LTE that I've written and submitting it to say half a dozen different papers? So while I don't think it's necessarily a problem to submit the same LTE to other papers, papers do want to make sure that they're the only one publishing the LTE. So I would just be just be diligent to make sure that if one paper ends up publishing the LTE to let the other ones know hey they published it. Now that can be a little bit different if you're submitting to a bunch of local papers so in Utah one of my LTEs actually got published and like they got published in like a southern Utah local newspaper and then it also got published in a Salt Lake Tribune and I don't think that they were too concerned because it didn't overlap with the people who were reading it but that is something to consider just try to get one LTE published in one place. I am in a community of about 80,000 here in northwest Arkansas. It is a blue island in a red sea and in our local newspaper we write regularly and the editors recognize us. You know when they when they don't know us yet they check our ID and they are very scrupulous about checking what we submit and if we write like a letter per month or something after a while they know who we are and some of us they rather like to get letters from so I would say you want your letter not to be broadcast to a bunch of other papers because that's not interesting content for the editor. They don't want something that looks like they stole it from some other paper and so I would say don't broadcast it at least tailor a version for your local paper. They'll like it and they'll receive you better in the future. That's absolutely right thank you and that was a really good way to put that. So I just wanted to say we have like 20 seconds 30 seconds to come back with your your targeted submissions and I'm pretty sure Nate might ask a few of you to share so just get ready for that. Yeah so yeah let's just go ahead and bring it back. So hold off for a second on which ones you have but keep that list up and then I will have you share in just a second. So now that you've picked the places that you want to submit the go ahead and choose one of those places for this next part. Just keep that in your mind as I go over this. So the next part is identifying your audience or your targets. So again this is going to depend on what kind of effort you're running. So if you're running an effort that relies on the voters this is most important when your target is a constituency. So if the paper is for a certain city county university whatever consider who you're writing to what they care about what's relevant to them right now how you can appeal to them. And then if you were running a campaign that's focused on legislators then you're identifying the targets going to depend on key committee members party leadership depending on the dynamic of your state and locality. So for example here in Utah we are mainly focusing on key committee membership but then we also had to consider focusing on party leadership for a moment because the Republican party is so strong here that they have their caucus is usually who ultimately decides what legislation goes into the session. So we want to appeal to the leadership who's making that decision as well. And then also that would be you know your state representatives and your senators and stuff like that. So if you don't know what your efforts can be focusing on yet that's fine maybe just pick one for this exercise. So now that you have your audience and who we're submitting to let's start a little bit of writing. So one short thing to touch on here is that while we while talking about approval voting and the reform overall is a good thing sometimes you want to narrow in on one specific benefit for the whole length of your LTE especially considering that LTEs are a very short thing you don't have much to include so you don't want to be naming off six benefits and then don't have time to get to any of them right. So the first sentence is often the most important so this is what grabs their attention gets the readers to want to keep reading and finish the LTE and oftentimes publishers will make the title of the LTE themselves just based on the content of your LTE. So you don't usually have to worry about creating a title but in the case if your publisher does allow title submission then the same considerations will go into the title as the first sentence how do you grab their attention how do you get them to want to read the LTE. Okay so what we're going to do now is just take another three minutes so take some time to consider your audience and your target and then just try to write one sentence that's just kind of attention grabby or maybe a few sentences if you have time and then I'd like to hear from two of you so um who you want to submit to who your audience is and then just what you've written so we'll just take another few minutes and again I'll keep the time so about three minutes from now all right we have about one minute left all right so that's time if you can just finish writing your sentences if you're in the middle of one all right so um let's go ahead and hear from two people on um what you've so who you're submitting to what your audience and or target is and then what you're up all right how about your freedom to exhale without a mask ends where my freedom to inhale begins yeah that that is an excellent attention grabbing line so he's mentioning something that's very relevant on everyone's minds right now um it makes you think what is he about to talk about next and now you're right so that was a great example thanks Nancy I think you're on mute um so uh community small and large rural and urban are wrestling with the question of how to reform criminal justice and policing systems in New York state the critical question in this conversation is what would make you feel safe in this community and um this letter is to candidates that are running for office so it goes on to ask what their solutions are perfect yeah that's great so um again very attention grabby a very relevant subject right now um and then that allows you to bring that subject that everyone's thinking about to the issue that you want them to focus on so that's a great great start okay so um so next uh we've talked a little bit about the topic um of the LTE we've talked about what the beginning should look like and what the end should look like with the call to action and the mention um so what about the rest what about the content in the body so this is going to depend a little bit on the general dynamic of your state so um for instance some of the questions you might be asking yourself is would it be necessary to address rcv for instance so for us and some of our LTEs we mentioned rank choice voting simply because there was a competing bill that was trying to make a great choice voting standard across the state and we were trying to get legislators to consider other options before committing to that um so that was something that was relevant for us to address it might not be for your state though um do you need to introduce people to the idea of alternatives first so um are people aware of alternative voting methods to begin with um and then again something to remember with this is to remember your audience who you're writing to so try to appeal to what they would be um interested in reading about um and what their values are okay so one thing when going into content that we found um is that people are ready for more detail than you might think so uh we were worried we might lose people by including too much detail um on certain topics or um specific benefits of approval voting but we actually had comments on a couple of our LTEs that asked for more detail and and um said we didn't give them enough info on approval voting so even though we discussed the benefits they wanted to know what's behind those benefits why do those benefits work and that was something that we thought maybe um would be too much jargon um but I think there's a line there there's um I think what the goal is is to go into the weeds just enough to spark their curiosity and to show them that you know what you're talking about and that encourages them to do the research on their own um and that's super beneficial for a lot of reasons one people like to make decisions on their own so if you you know it's sparked that curiosity and get them researching and then they learn more about approval voting that gets them uh more interested in wanting to help institute approval voting okay so then um another thing to consider when you're writing the body is the overall tone um you want to be respectful and professional to whoever you're writing about or to uh the last thing you want is your legislator opposing you because you owned them in the paper that's not helpful for us at all um even though it might feel good in the moment um and then furthermore doing anything that's not professional or respectful decreases your chances of getting published these papers and publishers they want to see a reasonable part of the conversation articulated well um so that it can further the conversation so that people can reply to it um so all of those kind of things are uh really important to keep in mind now another thing that I wanted to talk about is um writing an lte in response to another lte or in response to an existing article um this is another really good way to get people to pay attention to what you're writing about and um also if readers have read that article earlier in the week they might realize what you're responding to um so I'm gonna paste a letter by one of our members and here I'm just gonna paste the link and you guys can pull that up so it was on desert news um myles one of our members um wrote this in response to a another article that they were calling the draft party right and so um it was really awesome of him to respond to that in the way he did because it brought up the draft party again which is a very catchy headline you don't what are you talking about with a draft party right and then you read it and you understand so he responds to that um and then that gets more people who have already read that article looking um plus all the new readers so that's another thing to keep in mind is if if you have something to respond to um do it and include that in the article because that again it's that it's about that conversation and that conversation is what the papers and publishers are after all right so um now that we've gone over just kind of like the content of an lte the process of writing it um let's zoom out a little bit and take a look at how this all fits into your effort and um how to make that plan so um for us it was super essential for us to plan an lte effort over a period of months now if you're doing like a day of action or something that might be a little bit different you might want to try to get lte's published across several papers on one day just to make the day about what you're talking about but if you're going for something more long term um you're trying to get legislation passed you're trying to get a ballot initiative passed doing this over months is really helpful because uh it helps voters see this so so if you're focusing on voters it helps voters see this multiple times before they actually vote on the ballot initiative it gives them a chance to be exposed to the issue it gives them a chance to think about it and do their own research um if you're doing a legislature-based effort this helps because it lets them know that you're not going away and that your effort is strong and consistent so you're going to be here for a while um you're reminding them monthly or twice a month in the media that hey people care about this issue and we're going to be here trying to push that when the session comes around um so yeah those are some of the um things to consider when you're planning an lte effort so doing it over a few months is really important now the next thing is um having different members submit different topics so um it's really helpful for uh legislators and voters to see that multiple different people are posting about the same topic because if they see four lte is about approval voting within the period of two months but it's all by the same author these people their legislatures especially is going to think uh it's just one person it's not a big effort we don't really need to worry about it too much um but if you have different people posting they're going to realize more and more that um there's a lot of people that care enough about this to write into a paper and get it published um and then the other thing as i mentioned is different topics so um if you are going to be narrowing your in your lte around um various benefits of approval voting over a period of time maybe one time you'll submit uh one that focuses on the spoiler effect and then maybe you'll do one that focuses on center squeeze and um you know et cetera like all of these different benefits you want to have a topic about each one of them over time um again that helps get the voters your um your representatives just more educated about the effort and um that's it's good for all of us to have everyone educated so okay um so the next thing i want to do i just want to go ahead and give you a few more examples of some of the lte's we got published so i'm just going to post a few links in here for you guys so this first one um was written by amin here in utah um this was one that was written to a very specific publication um that he was familiar with and that very specific people read um so you can look over this and see how he appeals to the readers um i also really like his first line here so he says have you ever tried playing chess without taking any of your any of your opponent's pieces this question is ridiculous to anyone who has the slightest notion of how chess is played right so he he appeals to a topic that most people know about and understand that this is a ridiculous idea and then he later goes on and compares that to our current election process um and how approval voting could make that better um so uh in in these lte's you've seen a few examples of kind of how to grab attention um here's another one so this was published by um the solid tribune from one of our members uh ben and um so basically the idea of this is just a i'm sorry i'm not seeing the links oh are you in the chat let's see in the chat oh you might be incidentally DMing a person yet i'm just gonna say my hold on okay so here's the draft party one perfect thanks here's the chess one and then here is the one from ben so you can just get an idea um you can see that some of these are different lengths um and that's another thing to consider is different publications will have different length requirements you can see that on their publication page will usually list that pretty clearly but um you can just see the different approaches that we've taken um what we've talked about uh you know how we grab attention is different from every writer um but you just want to think about how you can do that how you can fit that into your writing style okay so um that's pretty much all i had prepared for uh to date is anyone have any questions i could go over or um any specific asks i have a question on the approval voting how do we identify targets how do we know who to write to yeah so um that's a great question maybe we can just go through an example so um for us with approval voting our ask was pretty straightforward um we found the committees that are going to be dealing with these type of methods and then we focused on the committee leadership and then we also focused on all the committee members after we had contacted committee leadership so it's kind of just setting out like a hierarchy of who's most important to contact right now um but for instance if you are doing um a ballot initiative and that ballot initiative is specifically for say like if we wanted to do one for Salt Lake City then maybe what we do is uh post an LTE to the Salt Lake Tribune and our target would be the voters of Salt Lake but then you want to consider what are the voters of Salt Lake care about what are they worried about right now and stuff like that which helps you narrow in um you know which movements are big right now and getting a lot of attention and maybe you can kind of tailor what you're saying to those the stuff like that is that kind of answer your question great i'd like to share um an experience um in our city of Fayetteville Arkansas um we have a secret group of letter writers made up of um friends who are members of the Omni Center for Peace Justice and Ecology here and we want to get a progressive voice displayed in the editorial page and we want to respond to the issues that are at play whether it's national or local whatever and um so we meet monthly and encourage each other and share tips and so on but nobody knows that such the group exists nobody knows that the rapid responders letter writing group exists and we don't refer to each other in our letters because we don't want um to have the perception that these people are in cahoots and are trying to harp us with this message or indoctrinate us with the message we wanted to look like a lot of separate voices are independently writing an opinion that is worth considering um otherwise our group would be like one person writing all the time and over years our group has faded and grown in energy and enthusiasm sometimes it almost fades out and then it resurges and stuff but a secret underground group can feel pretty hip and can accomplish those kind of things so it's just an idea yeah i love that um i think that actually is something really important to consider because as i mentioned earlier you don't want to make it seem like your whole campaign is coming from one person and that's the exact same thing if you um over years if you gave voters the impression that the only group fighting is your group um then it's going to seem like it's a smaller effort than exists right so um in our letters we never mentioned that we're part of utah approves um that we're you know talking with ces or anything like this we just focus on what's important and why we want the legislators to do this um and yeah it makes it look like it's just a bunch of different citizens writing in and that is the reality right we all came together because we were a bunch of citizens that cared about this issue but we all know the perception of bias can come into play when people think it's just a an interest group right so avoiding that is definitely a good thing to keep in mind any other questions or um asks or anything like that um i have a question also yeah when you're looking for um legislators or other people to identify what are like the best markers of someone who has like the the best chance of moving on an issue or you know because there's usually a lot of legislators so how how did you work through finding who did pinpoint in that process yeah so um what we did mainly was uh focus on again committee leadership so for us the um government uh government operations and then the political subdivisions were the two committees that would deal with voting issues um so we were trying to focus on those two and then um another thing that can be helpful though is uh say you've published a couple LTEs maybe you're in contact with these legislators so they know kind of what you want to do um maybe mention your legislator specifically um because later down on the line eventually the legislative body's going to vote on it so if you kind of have that all considered um and you write in saying hey I live in your district and you are my representative and I as a constituent I'm asking you to do this that motivates um those legislators to listen as well with submitting letters to the editor how much is too much um if I could somehow get um 10 people to all submit an LTE on the same topic would that be going overboard would it be bad if I was somehow able to submit an LTE every week for the same newspaper um yeah yeah that's an excellent question um so I think one thing you want to consider is how many publications you have um a lot of readers will read multiple publications um you know if you have like google feed or something you swipe over and it just pops up relevant articles to your interest right so you don't want to overwhelm people would say like I think 10 on one day would be a little bit much um maybe like two on one day about the same topic would be that already seems like a lot to be published in papers across the state on Monday um but if you have 10 people who are willing to write letter to the editors then spreading that out over a few months is a great idea because like I said it keeps up that pressure it lets the legislators and the voters know that this is an issue that's um relevant pressing that um there's people that are concerned with it and it's going to stay here and then we have Emily's hands up yeah um I was just wondering in anyone this is a question open to anyone on this call because I know Alice mentioned he had a group a progressive group he had organized um how do we target more um students or younger populations like high school and college kids and the immigrant communities I also live in a deeply red district I'm trying to flip blue and I feel like targeting these people is the way to go but I don't know where to find them because I'm 30 and a mom so I don't know yeah and I think that something that is really cool about uh letter to the editors because it helps you just get it out to the population and then you can kind of choose who you're tailoring it for um so one thing for like university students is looking for university papers to submit to and it's always a great idea um some of them may only take submissions from students themselves um but it's always worth looking into um otherwise if you're posting in papers that more than just your target population is going to read it can be important to again find what um what they care about what those voters are going to um you know what they're going to click on if they see something in a title so just kind of getting to know your audience a little bit know what they care about um right know what's important to them right now and and mention those things and what if we're trying to recruit these people to our groups or our coalitions to join us in writing these letters I mean because we also want to stay under the radar of our congresswoman's you know press machine um you know I guess signing my name I I guess a lot of people are really smart they go about maybe searching for me on Facebook but I don't know that everyone is that savvy um yeah do you have any suggestions for reaching looping those people into our group right yeah so um LTEs can be a good way to get new members interested in what you're doing and like you said there are going to be people who will look up your name they're going to look up the effort that you're doing and um for us it's really easy because if you search approval voting Utah we're the first like three results um so that kind of stuff works out but if you have someone if you're trying to recruit people that um maybe won't do that research I don't I'm tempted to say LTEs aren't the best place to do that just because they're very focused on convincing people of something you want to do um so you know you might mention like hey approval voting is great um this is what we want but if your call to action is join us then most people are going to forget what they just read if that makes sense um so I think maybe um you know coming up with some other ways to recruit and finding um other ways to get new members might be more beneficial and and we're actually going to be hosting more trainings about that kind of thing exactly because um this is one part of a much larger piece and it is much more effective to do actual either like relational organizing or community-based organizing to recruit and attract um people like the kinds of people that you would like to recruit and attract um and you don't really do that you have to do that in a much more direct way right like it's it's not usually the best idea to rely on like a third party kind of method yeah so it's it's much better to start to reach out to certain groups and um you build out a network and once that network starts to build out then it starts to reward you by giving you more and more opportunities to speak to more and more groups and you know have and this is where it's good and where we're also going to start trainings on like to have a presentation ready and um make sure that presentation is flexible enough to address multiple groups or make sure that you can target it to certain groups and you know you can you can um shove out things like that aren't necessarily um LTE's but you can use newspapers and other forms of media to say like hey we're going to have like open houses or whatever it is um or even like request um conversations with folks you can do that through like finding them on social media DMing them asking them if they would be interested in talking with you further there's a bunch of different ways to do it but LTE's are probably not the best ways to do it because a lot of these populations particularly younger populations are not reading letters to the editor diligently thank you and um that actually reminded me of something I wanted to touch on earlier a little bit um so when we were talking about getting more voices to submit and making it appear like it's coming from many people rather than one group another thing to consider is those um other groups that organize in your state around certain issues if you can create partnerships with them so for instance we've reached out to the local sunrise movement and partnered with them um it's really helpful to just ask hey can some of your members maybe submit an LTE that ties in what you care about so climate change um with approval voting and that that will help people um who are interested in climate change maybe read more about approval voting and um you know you can do that with anything any issue any group that you have in the state I'm curious about um how important timing considerations are is it important to submit this close to an election either before or after um is it super helpful to submit it in response to a recent news story or another LTE say one supporting garbage voting choice voting um or is it do I lose next to nothing by just submitting it out of the blue yeah um no timing definitely is something to consider um um and so like when I say that we're planning this effort over months when you're talking about maybe a specific benefit of approval voting those kind of things maybe aren't super essential on timing and those can be planned out over a few months during you know the off season or whatever um of your legislative body but um if if you have uh you know one like the legislative session is coming up it's about to start and you know that these committee members are about to look at your legislation focusing like a week-long campaign on trying to get four published all pressuring that same legislative like committee to focus on your issue that is something that's super helpful um so just considering uh what your goals are and what's coming up um can help you know what timing to apply with what you're submitting what's your six approximate success rate for getting LTE's published yeah um that would be a good question I don't know entirely how many we've published across the entire group but I would say that we're over 50 percent on our publish rate for from what we've submitted um already so that's been super promising um and I think I think it's just it's really helpful I think that first sentence of like bringing something relevant in is really helpful for getting published because um when the legislative session started one of the first LTE's that I got published was talking about how the whole legislative body is going to be focusing on like four different pieces of legislation on voting methods so super relevant people were like oh yeah I've heard something about this and then you know we focused on approval voting after that so that was really helpful for us I think and Alice has his hand up I wanted to mention to Frank that um one of the factors in the timing is that the editor is your friend in choosing the timing and we'll do it in a helpful way usually if an issue is hot and has a short shelf life he might um get it on the page right away or if it has expired already he might throw it in the trash or if it can wait because it has a long shelf life he might publish something somebody else's urgent today and save yours to good effect so you have an ally in that timing issue so it's okay to send things in and let them choose and um another point that occurred to me was um we were talking about I think you asked Frank how often to write um some papers have explicit rules right in in the guidelines it not only tells you how many words you must not exceed in your letter which you need to know and varies among newspapers but also you might be allowed to submit one newspaper a month and no more but if they look forward to your letters they're really welcoming of it on the 31st day they want to hear from you but they have their rules so you learn what the rules are at each target paper yeah and um I just want to add on to the sentiment that they're your friends um I had a really good interaction with uh one of the publishers here so um kind of along the thinking that we were talking about earlier I submitted two very similar they might have an identical LTEs to two different publishers one of them published it so I reached out to the other one and said hey just so you know got published in this paper um but then I was able to write a new one and have them publish that one and they were willing to work with me on that after they had already accepted the first one so um they're usually pretty responsive and uh willing to work with you on whatever you want to do all right we have like just a few more minutes so if anyone has any questions can ask them now comments all right if not um and you think of some oh were you going to say something Jim thank you oh thanks um so here actually I see Emily asked the question how do I get on the newsletter what I'm going to do is you can email me um and I can add you with your info if you have any more questions or you think of something um at a later time you can email me at any time I don't want to give that up for Nate without agreeing to it that's actually fine I was actually gonna say if um if anyone's like writing an LTE and has a question or would like some like feedback on it feel free to send it my way and I'm also in the discord uh if you are all not in the discord already I'm not sure if you are um let me just drop the link to the discord here just in case um it's a pretty easy way to get indirect contact with folks so here's the discord if you haven't joined already you can DM me there um and you know feel free to contact us any time thank you all for joining and um look forward to doing some more trainings and workshops and if you if some of you are in chapters and would like to lead workshops because you feel like you have a specific area of expertise I would love for you to reach out and we can work something out also um but if that's it have a great night and look forward to seeing you all soon