My Accidental Letter to the Editor

By Patrick Lozada on 11/28/2011 @ 04:01 PM

Tags: checkbook

I have a bit of a funny story for you all. One of my jobs at FCNL is working on the various action alerts that we post on our website that people use to contact their members of congress and write letters to the editor. This past week, I posted a letter to the editor alert responding to the supercommittee's failure and urging Pentagon cuts.

To make sure that the alert worked, I decided to give it a try and write a real letter to the editor. I had read through FCNL's tips on how to write a letter to the editor, so I went and found an interesting article to comment on and personalized the form letter to the editor with my concerns about local schools. Then I clicked send. I got an automated response saying that my letter had been submitted. My job was done.

Or so I thought. Less than ten minutes later, I got an e-mail from a staff member at the Charlotte Observer—the flagship paper in my home state of North Carolina. They wanted to publish my letter in the Friday editorial section!

More than 160,000 people read the Charlotte Observer every day (not including those who read it online), and many of them read my letter to the editor. Senators Burr and Kagan's staff also almost certainly read my letter while looking through the paper to see what their constituents are saying. In less than five minutes I was able to reach a huge audience, including my members of Congress, by filling out a simple form letter.

And you can too! Write a letter to the editor on our website advocating for Pentagon cuts. Our statistics show that people on our website are much less likely to write letters to the editor than to write to their elected officials. But as my story shows, it's a really easy process and it can have a huge impact. Write a letter today and tell your community and your legislators that you support $1 trillion in Pentagon cuts over the next ten years.