Hi! It's clonehub /milfcaptainrex (CH is a sideblog so I have to do anon) and I was wondering what your process was writing letters to Disney and the others in charge of The Clone Wars. You don't necessarily have to answer this, and my DMs are open should you prefer to talk in private. I was just planning something for UwwTBB. Thank you!
No problem at all, I think it'd be good to go over. @clonehub @milfcaptainrex When I was still a part of a group for Finish The Clone Wars, we got the following addresses to send: Lucasfilm PO Box 29901 San Francisco, CA 94129-0901 USA
The Walt Disney Studios (Company) 500 South Buena Vista St. Burbank, CA 91521 USA
Just above the company names, you can just write in the names specifying who you specifically want the letter to go to. Just be sure that you are sending them to the right places -- When I wrote to Dave Filoni, it was under the Lucasfilm address, for example. If you don't mind, I also want to go over everything else we did in preparation. Writing the letters was always a part of the plan, but we also needed to generate enough "evidence" that was worthy for action, if that makes sense?
For us, we had the main objective being: We want the series to return. But we realized that the counter to that from them would be: "Is there are demand for it? Would this be profitable? Would this be worth our time? How would this be beneficial to us?" To which we had to answer and find the info to back up all those things before I would draft out something that could be sent to them. Of course, it's frustrating to have to think within that mindset, but they are large companies that get input from strangers all the time. People who will offer up their opinions on how and what should be done without offering what they feel are "real" viable solutions.
So, before we wrote out the letters, we did a lot of research and made a website where we featured answers to a lot of common questions and misconceptions that people had about The Clone Wars series and evidence at the series' potential and how there was still a very prevalent demand for it so we could have something that they could reference. On top of that, we also had our petition which also served to generate an actual number we could give them of people who were still interested in the show. The person who used to mod our official Twitter and Facebook also DMed a lot of the creators directly while also offering up our website for more info. Not a lot of responses back, but we did get feedback from the ones who did, and were told that generating interest and showing that was one of the most important things for the campaign.
Having multiple social media sites where people could rally under also generated a lot of interest and kept things active while we also interacted with the community on a very regular basis. In addition to this, we realized a potential issue in calling for people to write letters themselves was often difficult -- unwillingness to actionable advocacy, shyness, whatever their reasons-- we instead called out for people to fill out their well wishes / personal sentiments about how they felt about the show within a google form which we then compiled into letters to be sent to the whomever they requested (ie. James Arnold Taylor, Ashley Eckstein, etc.) using the Lucasfilm address. That created more letters to also spread awareness, even if the process of sorting out all those responses honestly took a little while! We had something around 300 submissions, if I remember correctly. I think it was a few months later when we officially had only gotten one response from Disney, from their paralegal specialist which led our group to believe that this meant that they were not legally allowed to really confirm nor deny their plans for the series. In some ways, I feel that was the same situation for a lot of the people we had contacted via Lucasfilm as well.
But the acknowledgement also confirmed that we were being heard and I think it also helped that we sent out the letters to as many people as we could. In the end, it’s likely that a lot of them get letters all the time but casting a wider net meant that we would be more likely to get a response from someone. I hope that helps, it's a bit long but let me know if you have follow up questions, I'd be happy to help!