This is an attempt to organize tips useful when contacting MEPs, MPs, and other politicans by phone.
For now it's just a small, chaotic collection of thoughts.
Always be honest. It is them who don't tell the truth. Simplification is OK but be careful.
- If you are planning to call a politican, it might be a good idea to prepare a rough written plan of what you wan't to talk about, and send it to him by post, fax or e-mail. Two or three days after you expect him to receive it, call him and refer to your letter.
- Respect your adressee's time: if he says he is too busy to speak about it, ask politely if he is willling to schedule a conversation later, in the time chosen by the politican.
- Do not care much about the political party.
- Tell them about your situation, your friends, your collegues, your business( the important one).
- Be prepared is to hear the "usual lies", as you find it on the ffii website. Best is to avoid them already in your argumentation with terms like "as can be seen easily" or "when taking into account that" or "closer look". Example: "I am very concerned about a directive that looks like software should not be patented generally, but after a closer look it does exactly the opposite".
- concentrate on few important things. ... not more than 3 "messages" pro call
if your adresee is "democrat" tell him how concerned you are about the fake studies in the beginning of the directive, the way the (old) kommission handled it, how SMEs were threated first as open source freaks, then as anti globalization and then as ruthless liars. < Add something about german bank and european organization of SMEs here>
- if the party is more on commercial voters you can argue with barriers in the market, monopolism that hinders free competition
- tune your arguments ... best is to use the same wording they used a while ago on another topic. Simply: thats the speech they understand.
- dont call most important MEPs first ... learn from the calls you did wrong.
One more for interrogations:
Ask about reduction of taxes to compensate for the lower produktivity for SMEs. Ask about how much the cost of SWPAT is now in government IT. Ask about how much it will be after the directive is through.
Questions like these that do not have much "message" but let the adresse go into deep. But take into account that governments normally run to their patent office first.
