Best practices when contacting politicians

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At this week's Board of Supervisors meeting, there was one agenda item around dropping the plan to buy the Best Western in Pollock Pines to be used for a Project Homekey homeless shelter. There were a lot of letters, including a bunch from Cameron Park that were copy/pasted from a suggested letter that was sent out to a large group of people. At the meeting I spoke out against dropping the purchase even though Pollock Pines is not an ideal location. I felt that the site, which is already a Project Roomkey site with a lot of successes, was desperately needed since we don't have a permanent homeless shelter on the Western slope in El Dorado County (there are shelters in South Lake Tahoe). I also made a comment about the copy/paste letters which some people seem to have taken personally. Sorry, not sorry. I took a lot of time to write a personalized letter, and so did a lot of other people on both sides of the argument. Look, I get that people work and are busy and so on (so am I), but it is a pretty well known fact that elected officials are much more likely to pay attention to something that took the person a little time and thought than to a copy/paste. So with all due respect to the "Concerned NIMBYs of Don't Lower My Property Value", I just think that the next time you send a form letter to your members for them to send to a government official, you might suggest that they personalize it at least a little. It's what's known as a "best practice". Copy/paste just says "my group thinks this is important so I'm sending it", but it's lazy. If you really care about an issue, write at least a few sentences of your own. That's all.