Yes, faxes are taken seriously. Since the other part of my job is mail processing/data management/toner replacing, here is a true insider's view of how constituent correspondence is handled and viewed, in approximate order of effectiveness: 1. Personal contact. Almost anybody who personally meets an MC (Member of Congress) and gives him/her an address will almost get a guaranteed letter in the mail. Go to town hall meetings, campaign events, etc. 2. Handwritten or typed letters and faxes. Depending on the individual office, both are probably handled with equal care. For quickest response: 1) Keep the correspondence short. Ross Perot had this down to an art. All of his people flooded Capitol Hill with HANDWRITTEN 3x5 postcards that said nothing but "NAFTA NO!" We got the point and sent a response as soon as we were able to. 2) Do not discuss multiple issues. The LA's (Legislative Assistants) love nothing more than a letter they can zip out with an adequate form letter and thus increase their apparent productiveness when I print the weekly outgoing mail report. Multiple issues usually require the creation of a custom letter (probably even a combination Brady Bill/Feinstein amendment letter). Even worse than that is a letter with issues that are handled by more than one LA. This involves a lot of paper handling and approvals from several people before it can be sent out. Believe it or not, sending 2 letters on separate issues will probably get you 2 responses quicker than a you could expect a combined response. Every Congressional office is different. Every MC has different standards about how he wants his staff to handle the dilemma of fast/high volume vs. slow/custom response. The amount of mail we get boggles the mind. 3) Be neat and use correct ZIP code. Anything that takes staff time reduces the probability and prompness of a reply. 4) Be as individual as possible. Perot's "NAFTA NO!" postcards probably sat around longer than letters/faxes that his UWSA people had taken the time to hand-write. 3. Phone calls. These are written down on forms and put the same process as letters & faxes in item 2; however, they do require a great deal more man-hours in answering the phone and transcribing peoples' ramblings. Thus, the receptionist/intern (and eventually the rest of the staff) gets cranky and gets less and less sympathetic to the cause at hand when the volume gets high enough. 4. Pre-printed postcards. These make a Member's heart go pitter-patter because he/she sees them as a mountain of new constituents (voters) that can be reached. In reality, all staffs hate them and put them off until the next Congressional recess if they can, or even indefinately. They require a lot of time to sort (hundreds of different groups and issues), process, print, and file. Most U.S. Senate offices throw them directly in the trash, since their volume is exponentially more than that of a Congresional office. 5. Petitions. Just like postcards only worse. They are often copies of copies, with sloppy handwriting, no ZIP codes, etc. Correspondence accomplishes 3 things: 1) the constituent's voice is heard and tallied by his/her representative, 2) the constituent gets an informative response from said representative, and 3) the representative gets a name and address in his/her database to whom followups can be sent periodically. In most offices, the flow chart for mail (the way it is passed around and processed before a response is sent out) would look something like Bob Dole's flow chart of Clinton's health plan. Compounded by the fact that staff turnover is so high here, it's a miracle we get the mail out as well as we do.