WriteToThem is a website by

mySociety mySociety is a UK-based registered charity, previously named UK Citizens Online Democracy. It began as a UK-focused organisation with the aim of making online democracy tools for UK citizens. However, those tools were open source, so that the ...

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 A Member of the European Parliament (MEP) is a person who has been elected to serve as a popular representative in the European Parliament. When the European Parliament (then known as the Common Assembly of the ECSC) first met in 1952, its ...

. Users can send messages to them from the site; responses are then sent directly to the user's

email address An email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Engineer ...

. Unlike many mySociety sites, there is no public element to the correspondence.

History

The site launched in 2000 as FaxYourMP, allowing users to type a message into the website which would then be sent as a

fax Fax (short for facsimile), sometimes called telecopying or telefax (the latter short for telefacsimile), is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material (both text and images), normally to a telephone number connected to a printer o ...

to their representative's office. In 2005, it rebranded as WriteToThem, sending messages by email or as faxes to those representatives who did not yet operate an email account. 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 ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'' that the

Conservative Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, practices, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization in ...

Ian Liddell-Grainger Ian or Iain is a name of Scottish Gaelic origin, derived from the Hebrew given name (Yohanan, ') and corresponding to the English name John. The spelling Ian is an Anglicization of the Scottish Gaelic forename ''Iain''. It is a popular name in Sc ...

appeared to admit in an email to the site to attempting to "up" his rating by sending himself queries.

References

{{reflist MySociety British political websites Open government in the United Kingdom Internet properties established in 2005 2005 establishments in the United Kingdom