Anyone else think the automated Sinclair mailer is a bad idea?

[BUSHOUT]

Sure, you can write your own letter (or choose the stock letter).

But you have to go with thier short list of subject lines.

Won't this appear to be spam? I think it might, and that will undermine all of the personal emails we've written to advertisers.

Better idea is write your own letter, save it, and then manually send it to advertisers.
Go to the top ten list (here) and just work them if you're limitted for time.

Activism isn't supposed to be lazy!

Also, another poster pointed out in Activism/Events an interesting thing about a Sinclair station in his area. An article made mention that the Station had received many duplicate letters during another boycott campaign.

Read his post here

[Alleycat]

1. Done

Sent a personnal email to Iams and called the customer service line. With 4 pets all on Iams I said that if they don't make a choice I may have to exercise my choice to use a different product.

[BUSHOUT]

2. Nice work...

I have one medium dog, so I know how expensive the food is.

For 4 that's like $100-$150/month.

Remeber, when you switch foods ween them off!

[Dees]

3. I now use a dog food made by Diamond.

My vet/breeder said it's very good and half the price of Iams

[pop goes the weasel]

4. There's no reason you can't do both

I have. Sure, individual letters may count for more, but a large volume of identical letters or a petition have their own place. While you might enjoy wagging your finger at "lazy" people, the fact is that most people aren't going to take time out of their busy lives to write 100 emails, or even to send the same one to 100 different corporations. But those people do want the companies to know that they are indeed paying attention and will adjust their buying habits accordingly, and the companies should be made aware of that. Kudos to the people who make "lazy activism" possible.

[BUSHOUT]

7. Sorry about the "lazy" joke. Can we at least agree on some things....

At least they should let us put in our own subject?

And get rid of the stock letter?

Come on, give me some love here!
We disagree about the effect of spam mail. You think a "large volume of identical letters" has a worthwhile effect, I think it undermines us.
I could write a routine to send 10,000 different letters to 100 different companies.....why should they care?

These emails will come accross just like the email spam I get promising a bigger penis or a hot date...emails from robots.

[pop goes the weasel]

8. oh, I'll give you some love, OK

But it really does make a difference. Do you think that all the Bushbots who flooded CBS with hate emails sat down to pen each of them? Heck, no.

I've done research in presidential libraries, and you'd be surprised at how much of the citizen mail that remains consists of identical letters sent from different addresses. We can do the same thing electronically now instead of having to send the carbon copies out via snail mail to be signed and then re-mailed.

Usually, if I send a stock email, I change something about it. But not always--it depends on how busy I am and whether I have anything separate to say. I doubt it matters if I change something or not--if a business or a politician gets 10,000 similar letters, they aren't going to make a special effort to read the ones with a different subject heading. Even if you carefully craft a real letter and send it, you will get back from the exhausted clerk who handles all these things a letter so generic as to be meaningless. The only thing the recipient of the mail will do is count up number of yays and nays.

[sandnsea]

5. So what

An emails an email, the more they get, the more serious they'll take it. This is a numbers game, not an attempt at getting them to read individual emails. But I've sent other emails and made other phone calls in addition.

[Ms. Toad]

6. It is not ideal

And limiting the subject line is a really bad idea.

On the other hand, I am a precinct leader for Move-On with an ever growing list of voters I am supposed to contact 3x before election day, no volunteers working with me, and have two other issues in my area that are critical and deserve my time and attention (Ohio Amendment 1 and a judge who really badly needs to be voted out).

It's better than nothing.

(Warming up briefly before I hit the pavement again...)

[Eric J in MN]

9. I would have preferred it they let us change the subject-line, but

I still used the tool.