Our website WriteToThem helps you contact your elected representatives, quickly and simply. In a recent blog post, we explained that we’ve added a Welsh translation across the site, and made it easier to navigate recent changes to the Senedd.

And while those improvements clearly have a great benefit for residents of Wales, the work has also introduced a couple of features that will help all users of WriteToThem, no matter where they are in the UK.

1. Extra help in getting the right message to the right place

If you live in an area with a devolved parliament, you have a lot of politicians representing you: not just your local councillors and an MP; but also Members of your nation’s parliament. For anyone deciding to make contact with a representative for the first time, this can be bewildering — who’s the right person for your specific message?

And to be fair, it’s not always straightforward even for those living elsewhere in the UK. For example, you might have both district and county councillors: do you know the difference? Likely not unless you’re a real democracy maven.  

More people representing you might be a good thing, but when it comes to an individual wondering who best to contact about, say, bin collection, housing issues or the state pension, faced with a long list of potential recipients, it’s easy to just give up.

So how are we helping with that?

Once you’ve entered your postcode on WriteToThem’s homepage, the site displays a list of all the representatives you can write to, from councillors right up to Lords.

If you’re not sure which category of representative is right for your issue, there’s some brief guidance on the left of the page, explaining the top level of issues each is responsible for.

For more information, you can click “Not sure who to contact?” at the top of the page. By default, this takes you to an information page giving more information about every type of representative; but, as you’ve already input your postcode at this stage, it will only show you the information relevant to the representatives covering your area. 

You can see this for yourself if you replace the postcode at the end of this url with your own: https://www.writetothem.com/about-yourrep?pc=LA1+2ES.

For those using the Welsh site, this guidance is also, of course, available in Welsh.

Watch this space, as we also plan to introduce help for those who are looking at a list of representatives within the same category (eg, several councillors or Assembly Members), and wondering how to choose which of them to contact.

2. A simple way for campaigns to mobilise their supporters

Are you working for a cause and want politicians to know about it?

Ever since its launch back in 2005, WriteToThem has been a useful (and completely free) tool for campaigners on a low budget. All you need to do is direct your supporters to the site and encourage them to get in touch with their representative/s.

If that sounds helpful, take a look at our guidance, which we’ve recently refreshed.

Even better, we’ve updated the code that lets you put a professional-looking widget on your site. This looks a lot smarter than just a plain link, and you don’t need to have design or development skills — just copy the html and put it on your web page. 

We know that a lot of organisations don’t use WriteToThem to send messages: for them, the most useful part is being able to help their clients see who their representatives are, so there’s also the option to amend the widget so it says “find out who represents you”.

This widget can also be set up so that it toggles between English and Welsh, with your choice of what appears as the default.

There’s something else useful for campaigns, too: if you have a database of your supporters, including information such as their postcodes, you can make the path even smoother by sending a personalised link that saves them one or more steps in the email-writing process.

For example, if you know which type of representative you want them to contact, you can skip the screen where they have to select that; if you know their address, you can pre-fill those fields for them; and if you have their postcodes on file, you can take them directly to the letter-composing screen. 

Finally, we’ve added information about building big impact locally, and evidence-informed campaigning, making use of some of the other free websites we run.

All of this is explained in more detail in our guidance, so if it sounds helpful, do take a look!

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Image: Dinah Makhmutova