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Answering your questions before the vote today Indivisibles,
This is Sarah, Indivisible’s Chief Communications Officer (if you’ve been involved for a while, you may remember me from way back when the Indivisible Guide was first released!).
I know our team has been sending a ton of emails with a lot of information, so I wanted to answer a couple frequently asked questions. Obviously, our goal here is to be as helpful as possible, keep you aware of things that are moving, and make sure you have what you need to be successful in our critical advocacy efforts during this period.
First off: We’re expecting a vote on the next COVID-19 relief package in the Senate today around 4:00 pm eastern. So there’s really very, very little time left to have an impact on this bill. If you can, please make a call (or three) in the next few hours.
We’ve gotten a few questions about our priorities during this period, and some requests for help connecting the dots between some of the legislative asks that we want to try to address for you before we keep piling on. Here’s what people have asked:
Why are there so many things you're emailing us about?
That is a great question. There are so many things. Fundamentally, our priority during this period is that Congress put #PeopleOverProfits -- and we believe a package that does that would follow the 5 main principles and policy specifics of the People's Bailout (discussed and outlined in great detail on our landing page). As a reminder, those 5 principles are:
That's where things start to get more complicated -- but let's break it down! Under each of those principles, we'd like to see a number of policies included in the next coronavirus response package that Congress moves.
For example, we think the gold standard to protect our democratic processes while protecting each other (principle one) would be Senator Warren's plan for $4B to do a huge list of things that we detail in our explainer here.
On that second principle of making health the top priority, for all people, with no exceptions, that's where you'll see Indivisible talking about the importance of increasing federal funding for Medicaid and other health programs that cover low-wage people and communities of color, and that testing and treatment are available regardless of immigration status (and a few other things like ending surprise medical billing.)
Over the next period of days and weeks, you're likely going to hear from us on other specific bills and policies that fall within this broader People's Bailout framework -- and we'll want to give those attention too: talk about them on social media, drive calls, record videos, etc.
You've only told us about federal advocacy -- what about state and local things?
Also a great question. Right now, we have this wonderful resource designed to work for anyone in any state to pick up and start to think about their individual and group state and local advocacy. Our State Policy team is working on an addition for that resource that would be a toolkit for groups with some step-by-step activities to drive some of this state and local advocacy -- we hope to have that to you soon!
We're also talking about how we can ramp up this support through a scaled support system and some deeper, targeted state-level work. We'll have more to report out on that front very soon!
Why are you pushing things like videos and email your member of Congress so hard?
So, here's the deal. Just like we've had to adjust how we work here at Indivisible, members of Congress and their staff have also had to adjust the way that they're working. From conversations on the Hill, we’re hearing that lots of offices are only routing their office's calls to one remote staff member, that voicemail boxes are filling up fast, and that people are simply having a harder time getting through.
That said, emails are being logged just like phone calls into their constituent management system (so, if you make a call, those details go to the exact same place as if you send an email), and staff are sending more reports of what they're seeing tagging the member of Congress on social media.
For all of those reasons, we're just giving folks some extra tools to make their voices heard during this period that we think will be effective. Also, remember, letters to the editor and longer form op-eds are always effective in taking control of and shaping the narrative on issues constituents care about (and you can be sure that the letter or op-ed will show up in your member of Congress' press clips if it mentions them or an issue their staff is closely monitoring).
What’s specifically in this version of the relief package (the one they’re voting on today)?
Not much that’s good. As we said in this tweet thread, this bill is far from the kind of people-first response we wanted to see from Congress.
All in all: it doesn’t do nearly enough for the people most impacted by COVID-19. We need to continue pressuring our members of Congress to #PutPeopleFirst, and we need to do it now because they’re voting later today.
Got it. Where are all those scripts and resources again?
You got it, fam. Here's a quick list of the main resources you should have at your fingertips.
Call/Email/Letter to the Editor scripts:
Video Pages:
References and Resources:
That's it. Those are my answers to the questions we’re getting the most. If you have more, shoot us an email (you can reply to this one and we’ll get it, even though it’s called “no-reply”) and we’ll try and get back to you soon.
Stay safe, stay healthy, stay active,Sarah (and lots of people working on this!)
P.S. -- As you’ve probably guessed, we’ve had to do a lot of re-working of our plans over the last six weeks. That’s what we’re experts at: adjusting and reorganizing to respond to Trump’s latest, but it still meant a lot of new work we didn’t expect, right at a moment when many of our supporters are losing their jobs and aren’t able to donate to support the work. If you’re able to make a gift to help offset that and fund this and all our work, we'd really appreciate it. No pressure. 
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