We received a tweet this morning wondering how many emails there had been to MPs on the subject of the ‘Refugees Welcome’ campaign, and whether WriteToThem, our contact-a-politician website, might have some relevant data.

Well, it’s not quite as simple as it might seem. WriteToThem’s privacy policy makes it clear that we will only look at certain types of data: we won’t (bar exceptional cases related to the running of the site) look at the text of users’ messages, even in an automated fashion, so there’s no way of narrowing down which topics people are writing about, for example by counting how many users’ mails contain words like ‘refugee’ or ‘immigrant’.

Even if we could, WriteToThem is a completely non-partisan service, and users may be writing on either side of an issue.

We do use Google Analytics, which collects entirely anonymous statistics on how many people visit the site, how long they stay on it, etc. There is one clear indication that the site is being used more than usual: user numbers on Thursday and Friday of last week were about 5 or 6 times higher than the norm. There was a dip at the weekend — there generally is — and numbers have continued to climb on Monday and today.

Google Analytics also allows us to see which websites have referred people to our site. Over this period, it seems it was mostly Facebook and the petitions site Avaaz.

Rollercoaster

With most websites, you can regard visitor numbers as a pretty good indication of your success — if they’re going up, then at least something’s right.

With WriteToThem though, user numbers regularly fluctuate so wildly that you could be fooled into thinking we’re on the brink of disaster, or the brink of world domination, from one week to the next.

In the normal way of things, there seems to be a baseline at which the UK populace will toddle along. A small percentage of us will write to our politicians whenever we have an opinion that we want to express, but most of us are content with a few acerbic Facebook updates or heated discussions down the pub.

Then, now and then, an issue comes along which grips the nation. This week, that would indeed appear to be the issue of refugees.

Of course, we’re always glad to see the site used, and we hope that people who are referred to it because of an issue they care about will also remember it’s there whenever they need to contact their representatives in the future.

Incidentally, if you are running any kind of campaign and you would like to harness WriteToThem’s functionality on your own site, don’t forget that we’ve written a guide to doing just that.

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Image: Andre Vandal (cc)