Who are you, and why are you doing this?

WriteToThem makes it easy for anyone to contact their representatives, even if they don’t know who they are.

If you can’t name your MP, that doesn’t make you unusual. 78% of the UK population cannot name their representative in Parliament, according to the 2013 report from the Hansard Society (PDF).

That’s the reason this website exists - but if you’re interested to know a bit more about the whys and wherefores, read on.

Our history

The first version of WriteToThem was built in 2004, by a group of volunteers who thought that it should be easier for people to contact their MPs. Does that seem like a long time ago? It’ll seem even longer when you find out that it was, at that point, called FaxYourMP.com.

That group of volunteers later grew into mySociety, the project of a registered charity.

mySociety’s mission is to build internet projects which give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives.

Our first project was to take FaxYourMP and rebuild it so that it was bigger and better. As email became more prevalent, we adapted the site to work almost entirely via that form of communication.

We’ve kept on working, adding more types of representative, improving the design - but at its core, WriteToThem has the same mission as its predecessor, FaxYourMP: we just want to lower the barrier to taking the first step, and writing to the people in power about the issues that matter to you.

Funding

We had funding for the initial work from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s e-innovations fund, in partnership with West Sussex County Council. Many thanks to them.

We also receive assistance from GovEval, who have kindly made available their database of local councillors; and from Mythic Beasts, who host this and other mySociety websites.

Like many mySociety projects, WriteToThem combines the work of some core developers, who are paid to keep working even when everyone else gets bored, and volunteers.

Here is a list of people who have helped build, maintain and support FaxYourMP or WriteToThem:

• Owen Blacker
• Mike Bracken
• Matthew Brown
• Frederick Brummer
• James Cronin
• Louise Crow
• Richard George
• Jonathan Hogg
• Cait Hurley
• Manar Hussain
• Malcolm Hutty
• Francis Irving
• Chris Lightfoot
• Tom Loosemore
• Stefan Magdalinski
• Adam McGreggor
• Craig Nicol
• Danny O'Brien
• Anna Powell Smith
• Sam Smith
• Alaric Snell-Pym
• Matthew Somerville
• Tom Steinberg
• Stuart Tily
• Sam Urquhart
• Matt Zandstra