Call for participants
mySociety wants to help you use FOI in a campaign or advocacy project
mySociety has the capacity to support a limited number of organisations working with marginalised populations in the UK. We’ll help you to make and analyse Freedom of Information (FOI) requests so you can use the data in your campaigning and advocacy.
Sounds good? Please read on, then fill in this short questionnaire to tell us about your organisation, your project and any timelines you are working to.
Please note: this offer is only open to organisations, and specifically those working with marginalised groups in the UK*.
A little context
Last year, mySociety carried out research into the use of FOI to support social change for marginalised communities in the UK.
That research informed a small number of free training seminars explaining different facets of FOI use. We’re now starting phase two of this project, aiming to provide dedicated support to ten organisations, helping them use FOI in a campaign or advocacy project between January and July 2025.
What can FOI do for you?
If you’re new to FOI, you should know that it can be used to great effect in campaigning and advocacy, from gathering data to prove the need for your work, to uncovering corruption or maladministration. To find out more, browse our case studies or watch the seminars from phase one:
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During this project we’ll set you up on WhatDoTheyKnow Pro (if you don’t already have an account); we’ll give you advice and support on framing your FOI request, who to send it to, how to respond to requests for clarification or rejections, and if necessary, how to submit something for internal review.
For large-scale FOI investigations where you’d like to collaborate with other members of staff, we can also show you how to use our Projects software, which makes it super-easy to work as a team and extract datasets from FOI.
What will you get out of this?
Once the data starts coming in from your FOI requests, we’ll help you load them into our Projects tool so you can decide how best to analyse the data with your team. You’ll end up with a spreadsheet from which you can draw conclusions to help shape your campaign or advocacy work.
You’ll be working in a small cohort of 2-5 organisations, and we’ll keep you together as a group so you can share common problems and we can also see where each organisation might hit different hurdles.
There’s no charge for this service: all we’re asking is for you to attend calls with mySociety/your cohort to feed back to us how things are going, tell us what your pain points are and ask us lots and lots of questions about FOI! We’ll also want to write or record a case study about you for our reporting and communications teams.
* What is a marginalised community? For the purposes of this project, this refers to any group campaigning or advocating in the UK with or for:
- People who are disadvantaged by their social and/or economic background or circumstances
- People with Black, Asian or other Minority Ethnic heritage
- People living with disabilities and chronic illness
- And, within these groups, particularly those with low digital literacy.
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