"How do you effectively influence lawmakers on policy?" You don't. You either need to know someone at the top, or organization a collective. It's tough to get

"How do you effectively influence lawmakers on policy?" You don't. You either need to know someone at the top, or organization a collective. It's tough to get meetings with reps at the state level or higher as an individual. Emails, calls, letters, etc are answered by other people and usually are just a canned response, sometimes they're even about the correct topic (I've had them send canned responses that were only tangentially related at best). The fact is, the politicians represent too many people to give even the small percentage of engaged constituents any real attention.