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.

Here’s a question inspired by this mail from a WriteToThem user:

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Subject: yes but….
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006

My MEP did respond by sending 13 sheets of best quality paper – I wanted her to respond by EMAIL not waste a forest like this! I was horrified and emailed her to tell her so. In fact her answer to my question was simply ‘NO’ so the 13 sheets were a smokescreen ! Perhaps this advice could be passed to all MEPS thinking of sending out large wads of paper
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Now, we could encourage representatives to email or phone rather than write back to their constituents on paper. However, if we did so there are two issues:

1) Is it actually more environmentally friendly to use a PC/phone than write a letter?
2) Is it worth annoying the representatives who are used to writing back in their own preferred manner, perhaps even leading to fewer constituents getting help?