Owner mySociety Website www.writetothem.com | Created by mySociety | |
Type of site Site for contacting elected representatives Slogan(s) Write to your politicians, national or local, for free. Alexa rank 399,718 (September 2012) | ||
WriteToThem is a website by mySociety which allows UK citizens to contact their elected representatives. Users do not need to know their representatives’ names: instead, using the mySociety software MapIt, the site matches their postcode to its various constituency boundaries, before displaying elected representatives at all levels of UK government from local councillors to MEPs. Users can send messages to them from the site; responses are then sent directly to the user’s email address. Unlike many mySociety sites, there is no public element to the correspondence.
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History
The site launched in 2004 as FaxYourMP, allowing users to type a message into the website which would then be sent as a fax to their representative’s office.
A year later, it rebranded as WriteToThem, sending messages by email or as faxes to those representatives who did not yet operate an email account.
Controversies
mySociety publish an annual table to show which MPs are the most and least responsive; this is based on the results of a rolling survey which is sent to users two weeks after they use the site.
In 2006, it was reported by the Guardian that the conservative MP Ian Liddell-Grainger appeared to admit in an email to the site to attempting to "up" his rating by sending himself queries.