HOW TO CREATE AN ORGANIZATIONAL SIGN ON LETTER
An organizational sign-on letter can be used to demonstrate broad support for, or opposition to, an issue, idea, or action. Beyond Plastics utilizes sign-on letters frequently, and they are a helpful tool for coalition-building in all types of campaigns.
Follow the steps below to craft an effective sign-on letter and gather lots of signatures to help sway decision-makers. If you’re a visual and audial learner, we’ve also recorded a video of our organizing director, Alexis Goldsmith walking you through the process.
STEP 1: Identify who to address the letter to.
Who you address the letter to will depend on the issue at hand. If your letter is about a local law to ban polystyrene, you may address it to the City Council President and Council Members. If you are urging your local school board not to consider artificial turf for a new field, you might address it to the members of your school board and school superintendent, and cc: the school principal. If you’re responding to a public comment period, the government agency will provide clear instructions about who to address the letter to and by when you must submit your comments. Whomever the letter is addressed to should be directly responsible or have influence over the issue at hand.
STEP 2: Draft the letter.
Introduction. Your letter should open with a thesis paragraph clearly stating the issue and listing the primary reasons why, or why not, the undersigned organizations support or oppose a proposed solution to the issue.
Supporting arguments. The body of your letter should then lay out a strong argument addressing each claim you list in the first paragraph. For example, if your thesis states that you are opposed to the county approving a permit for a new waste incinerator because burning waste contributes to climate change, toxic pollution, and environmental injustice, you should have a full paragraph explaining the negative impacts of each of these three negative impacts of incineration.
References. Be sure to provide citations for any facts, figures, and claims you include.
Solution. If your letter is one of opposition, you should offer a better solution to the problem at hand, if possible. Dedicate at least one paragraph to describing a better course of action that could be taken.
Closing. Close your letter with a brief summary and urge the addressee to take action. Be specific about the desired outcome or action you are requesting, e.g.: “We urge you to vote “no” on the proposal for a new waste incinerator.”
STEP 3: Consider sharing your draft with key partners first to get consensus on the text.
If you’re working with other organizations or key coalition partners who have regular input on the issue you’re writing about, it may help you to garner more signers to run your draft by them before declaring the letter final. Giving them a chance to request edits will help increase the likelihood that influential groups in the space will sign on. Then again, it can also complicate and delay the process so this step is optional, based on your situation.
STEP 4: Format your letter.
Once you’re happy with the text of the letter (and potentially secured sign-off from key coalition partners), put the name, title, organization, and address of the person you are addressing the letter to at the top, along with the date the letter will be delivered. If you plan to cc’ anybody when you deliver the letter by email, list them, as well.
Include a greeting and subject line calling attention to the issue at hand. You can also add your logo or letterhead at the top, along with the logos of any other key coalition partners who are joining you.
STEP 5: Create an online sign-on form to gather signatures.
Unless you’ve got a better custom solution at hand, a good old Googleform is the simplest way to let organizations easily sign on to your letter. It will automatically generate a spreadsheet with all your signatures in one place, and you can easily clean up any duplicates. See the series of screenshots below for a glimpse at the interface on an existing sign on form.
“Responses” is what you click to see who has signed on to your form.
Once you’re in the Responses section, you can either view the responses below as individual responses, by question or all together, or, our recommendation, you can click the little green spreadsheet icon to see them all in a googledocs spreadsheet.
In the spreadsheet, which will update automatically as more people sign on, you can view everyone who has signed in one place. You can also easily share these results with others in your organization or coalition who are helping with the sign-on letter and want to keep up to date on who has and has not signed on yet to help them tailor their outreach efforts. You can make a copy of the responses or download them as an Excel spreadsheet from here, too.
STEP 6: Make sure the form provides all the key information and collects all the data fields you’ll need.
This form is your public facing signature-collection tool so you need to make sure it’s clear, compelling and complete. It should include the following in the description/introduction:
A short, compelling explanation. Open your form by including a very brief explanation of what the opportunity is and why people should sign their organizations onto the letter in the form description.
Letter text. You’ll need to provide the text of the letter you’re asking people to sign on to. If your letter is very brief (no more than three short paragraphs), you can copy and paste the text right into the form description. However, if your letter is longer than a few paragraphs - and most are, it’s better to link to a PDF or non-editable googledocs version of the letter in the description so that you do not push all the form fields down several pages as fewer people will sign on if they can’t see the form without a ton of scrolling.
Deadline to sign on. Make sure to include the deadline for organizations to sign on - the deadline should be a few days before the letter is delivered, so you have time to format it.
Now on to the form fields. At a minimum, you should include the following questions on the form although you can add others if additional information such as phone number and mailing address would be useful to you in your coalition-building or in future outreach:
First name
Last name
Organization
Title
Do you have permission to sign on behalf of your organization? If you do not have permission, please do not submit this form as we cannot accept individual signers. (yes/no)
Email address
STEP 7: Make a circulation plan.
Once your letter and sign-on form are ready to go, make a list of all the organizations who might sign on to your letter in a spreadsheet, noting who should reach out to each contact.
Draft a template email, including the form, letter, and deadline, inviting organizations to sign on. It will speed up your outreach if you have the language ready to go and you can also avoid confusion by crafting a solid outreach message that covers the important points each person should be making so that people are not ad libbing.
Plan to give organizations at least two weeks to sign on. You may have to reach out more than once to get them to sign.
STEP 8: Do your first round of outreach.
Reach out to all the people on your list. Check in with others in your local group or affiliated organization (or coalition) to make sure they’re also sending out emails to all of their contacts.
STEP 9. Do your second round of outreach.
About a week into the effort, plan to do a second round of outreach to anyone on your list who has not yet signed on. And plan to check in with your fellow outreachers to make sure that they do the same thing.
STEP 10. Do your final round of outreach.
One or two days before your sign on deadline, do a final round of outreach to attempt to convince a few more stragglers to sign on. Deadlines are highly motivational to most humans so lead with the urgency of the timing in your outreach. Check in with your colleagues, fellow volunteers, coalition members to make sure they are also doing a final round of outreach to everyone they were assigned to contact who has not yet signed on.
STEP 11. Format your signatures.
Once the sign-on deadline passes, download the list of signers. Remove any duplicate signatures and any signatures from individuals who do not represent an organization, and fix any typos and errors signers may have made when they filled out the form. Then you’re ready to format all your signatures at the bottom of your letter. Put your signature and that of anyone who co-authored at the top, then list all the signatures in alphabetical order, unless there are organizations you know command particular interest or respect that you wish to list at the top. If you’ve succeeded in collecting a great deal of signatures, you may find it helpful to create a mail merge for either a directory or labels to fill the signatures all in in a few columns. However, if that’s too challenging, just paste them all into the document in one long list!
STEP 12. Finalize your letter.
Once you’re satisfied with the way the letter looks and the signers are formatted correctly, turn your letter into a PDF file. If you do not have Adobe or another free PDF maker, you can most likely create a PDF by going to Print in your options and selecting “Print to PDF” which will then allow you to save the document as a PDF. You can also save a Googledoc as a .PDF.
STEP 13. Deliver your letter.
After your letter is formatted, you’re ready to deliver it. Email your letter as an attachment, hand deliver it, or mail it.
STEP 14. Let the world know.
Post your final letter online on your web site or as a publicly viewable googledoc and share the link to it on your social media channels - making sure to tag all signatories who are active on that platform (you can do this in subsequent tweets and comments if you can’t fit everyone in your initial post or tweet.) You may also want to draft and send out a short press release to any reporters you’ve interacted with or think might be interested to bring more attention to your coalition’s message.
STEP 15. Save all the signers’ information for your future outreach and coalition efforts!
Not only have you just helped to sway decision-makers about an important issue, you’ve also just increased your connections with like-minded organizations who you may wish to collaborate with in the future. Take the time to take all the great contact information you’ve just gathered and store it in a new organizational contacts spreadsheet/googlesheet/Rolodex. (If it wasn’t already obvious, Beyond Plastics is a Google-centric organization so we recommend a Googlesheet as it’s so easy to share and update.) Taking a few minutes now to do this will make it much easier for you and your co-conspirators to do outreach the next time you’re looking for organizations to sign on to your letter, campaign, etc. Don’t skip this step - you’ll thank yourself later, we promise :)
