This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The story of a former Congressional staffer with some advice began to circulate among those feeling hopeless and unheard after last Tuesday's election results.

Laypeople have a half-dozen ways to communicate with their representatives in Washington, D.C., and their voices will be amplified if they eschew the written word for phone calls or in-person events, Emily Ellsworth wrote in a string of tweets Friday.

By Tuesday, those tweets had been written about by CNN, Yahoo and The Huffington Post, and retweeted by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and comedian Patton Oswalt. HBO talk show host Bill Maher shared a link to a story about Ellsworth's guidance.

Now a 30-year-old writer, editor and social media manager who lives in Lindon, Ellsworth said that even as a studier of viral content, the response took her by surprise. Her followers grew from about 5,200 to more than 13,000, and her account was verified by Twitter.

"All I did was basically just tell people what lobbyists have known for years," she said.

Ellsworth worked for four years in the Provo office of Rep. Jason Chaffetz and nearly two in Salt Lake City as constituent service manager for Rep. Chris Stewart. She left in October 2014, she said, "burned out" by the government shutdown a year earlier.

This year, she served as state leader of Republican Women for Hillary. She felt "disgust" for President-elect Donald Trump, she said, and more closely aligned with Clinton's moderate views. But her tweets had no partisan intent, she said.

Ellsworth added that it was especially gratifying that after some respondents said their representatives haven't listened to them, those Twitter users soon got a response from said representatives' accounts, urging them to call.

Ellsworth's now-famous advice:

mpiper@sltrib.com

Twitter: @matthew_piper