I’m happy to say that with a lot of help from Francis and Matthew I’ve just rolled out a long-requested addition to WriteToThem. You can now use the site to write one message and send it to all your representatives in a multi-member constituency – so, for example, you can send a message to all your MEPs at once. A nice side project along the way has been getting the test suite for WriteToThem running happily on a mySociety server, and adding a few more tests. Run, tests, run! Good tests.
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Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 by Louise Crow
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February 3rd, 2007 at 8:14pm
Awesome! Neat idea
February 6th, 2007 at 1:14am
I would like to know more about this new feature, please. I guess it does not give the MEPs the impression that they are being contacted in a “wholesale” way. On the other hand, won’t that encourage people to send “carbon copyed” messages? How is the personalization treated? Please, I’m just worried with assigning more value to the communication between voters and representatives. Thanking you for sharing your views and experience, with best regards, Creso.
February 6th, 2007 at 8:01am
The message that gets sent to the representatives includes a short note telling them who else the message has been sent to.
February 6th, 2007 at 8:26am
Hi there
I tried to use the write to them to contact my MEPs and unfortunately it did not work – the link came back also as having errors – are there problems?
February 8th, 2007 at 8:03pm
Personally I don’t think this is always going to be a good idea.
I currently work in a complaints department within local government. If you complain to multiple representatives about the same (local) issue, they will forward it on to people like me, which creates (number of representatives) times as much work with little advantage over one letter.
For example, one group has written to every MP and MSP in our area, as well as directly to the council, which has led to six identical enquiries being generated. This doesn’t speed up the process of getting things sorted, it bogs it down.
February 13th, 2007 at 11:35pm
Although this may slow things down, nevertheless it creates far greater awareness and interest in issues of personal concern, eg I could now write to ask how much public money has been spent on adapting streets for blind people and what if any efforts have been made to help speech impaired people communicate with public and private sector organisations.