As someone who interned in a senator’s office for a summer, I have to note that writing a letter to the editor that mentions your senator and having it published in one of your state’s newspapers is the single best way to get his or her attention.

This merits slightly further explanation:

Every morning in my senator’s office, one of the tasks I had was to compile key national and state news articles for distribution in the office. Any time the senator’s name was mentioned in an editorial in one of the 7 or so biggest newspapers in our state, you could count on the editorial making the list for the document. Once compiled and formatted correctly, the document was made available online to anyone in the senator’s office, and we also printed off paper copies of the document for the senator and 15-20 staff members and placed them on their desks. That was the first thing my senator looked at every morning.

I routinely saw interns from other offices doing the exact same thing, so my impression is that this was pretty standard procedure.

You should still make the calls, obviously, but if you aren’t writing letters to the editor for your local newspaper, you’re missing the biggest, most direct way to get your senator’s attention, since they care more about what you say in the newspaper than what you do to an intern on the phone because many people will read the former, whereas the latter has essentially zero effect on public perception.