In my opinion, one should never under-estimate the power of letter writing, especially to the head of an organization to solve a problem. Over and over I have seen how incredibly powerful a letter can be. My 7th grade teacher used to always say: "The pen is mightier than the sword." Of course, in the 7th grade I had no idea what she meant or how true those words were, but I have lived long enough and fought enough battles to confirm that it is indeed true.
One of the best examples I can cite is once when I worked in radio I used to get music from record labels to use for production. In radio, production is typically one of the duties on-air personalities have for the radio station. It involves producing the commercials that you hear on the radio station.
I called one well-known record label and left a message asking for some music that I could use for music beds. Luckily this was back in the day of answering machines with taped recorded messages. I got a returned call from a fairly young sounding man who delightfully told me they did not have any music to send me. He thought he hung up the receiver before he started clapping, and celebrating the fact that he told me No! I got every word his victory celebration on my answering machine.
After I listened to the taped message, I removed it from my answering machine and took it to work with me. I asked our production manager if he had the equipment to lift the message from the miniature tape from my answering machine. To my surprise, he did. He re-recorded it on a cassette tape which I sent along with a letter to the president of the record label.
Within a few days I got an urgent call from the president of the record label apologizing profusely for the employee's behavior. Although the letter and tape were important, I think what was equally important was that he knew I worked for a very powerful radio station in Atlanta at the time. He assured me the employee had been dismissed.
In an attempt to make amends, he sent me their music catalogue and told me to choose 30 cds. I still have all 30 of those cds because I took the time to write a letter! The lesson here is to make sure you disconnect the call before you celebrate and never under-estimate the power of writing a letter to the powers that be!
Angela Greene is the author of Unnecessary Roughness-The Story of a Mother's Fight for Justice coming Spring 2016. She is also an advocacy expert and media professional. She is the founder of, Change Agents Advocacy Group, a social justice advocacy group that seeks to educate and empower people about social injustices. They specialize in helping clients with conflict resolutions.