If your letter doesn’t get the results you are looking for (or just to emphasise your point), arrange a face-to-face meeting.
Top Tips
- Know what you’re talking about!
- Write down what is agreed;
- Follow it up.
How to get a meeting
MPs
MPs hold regular ‘surgeries’ for their constituents. These are often advertised in the local paper or you can find out times from their constituency office. Make an appointment in advance or turn up early! You could also hold a public meeting and invite them to attend.
Vice Chancellors and Corporates
- start by writing and asking for a meeting;
- if this doesn’t work, try demonstrating the level of public support (demos, petitions, mass letter-writing);
- use the student or local press to expose that this person won’t meet you;
- for VCs ask the SU for advice, they may know which channels are most effective.
Before the meeting
Prepare what you’re asking
Once you have worked out what you are going to ask the decision-maker to do, you need to decide how you are going to communicate it to them.
Limit yourself to 3 key points at the most, which:
- Communicate the issue/campaign;
- Give the decision-maker a reason to support you and fulfil your demands;
- Are backed up with a couple of key facts.
Get together beforehand and decide which aspects of the issue each of you will concentrate on, so you don’t have just one spokesperson. It is often useful to have one person just observing the conversation and making notes, only entering it if the discussion is wandering off-course or getting too heated.
MP surgeries
- Make sure your are fully acquainted with the issue. However, unless the issue is one of your MP’s main interests, you will often know far more than they do.
- MP surgery meetings are normally only 10-15 minutes long and quite informal.
- In a group, decide on whether you will make individual appointments or go together as a small party.
During the meeting
- Look at our public speaking guide for top tips on presenting your case clearly.
- Ask the decision-maker to do something specific (if appropriate).
- Take brief notes of what they are saying, especially anything they agree to.
- If you go as a group, donīt disagree with each other.
- Take along relevant briefing material and offer to send further information if they are interested.
After the meeting
- Write a short letter to thank them for seeing you.
- Keep up the dialogue - react to events and campaign initiatives with further letters.
- If they agreed or refused to do something, see if it is of interest to the local media.
- Again, if you donīt get the response you want, be persistent, encourage others to visit them, or go in a large group to demonstrate the support your cause has.