Our WriteToThem website makes it easy for anyone to send an email to their elected representatives. That’s the core concept, and it works brilliantly for millions of users every year — but that said, we’re aware that even when a website is simple and built with usability at its core, not everyone has an equal ability to access it.
As part of our warm up for a new programme of work on WriteToThem, we’ve published some of our internal research from a few years ago on messages written on behalf of someone else — what we’re calling ‘proxy use’.
The reasons for this are easy to understand: the primary subject may not be confident at writing in English; may be elderly or have a condition that makes it easier to delegate the task of writing; or may generally use internet services through intermediaries.
The key findings are:
- A small group of users (5%) were writing on behalf of someone else.
- Proxy messages made up 6.8% of messages to local councillors, and 4.5% of messages to MPs. This would account for an estimated 55,000 messages to MPs through the service in 2019.
- The largest group was people who were writing on behalf of family (40%), but there were also people writing on behalf of local groups (40%), friends or people they knew (12%), and service providers writing to representatives on behalf of clients (8%). Messages on behalf of clients from carers would have accounted for an estimated 7,500 messages in 2019.
We’re about to embark on research and development work around WriteToThem, and these findings will contribute to our understanding around making it easier to get the right type of message to the right place.
If you are interested to dig deeper into everything we discovered around proxy usage, take a look at the full piece of research here.
