Understanding more about constituent communication
We’ve released a new report exploring insights from WriteToThem about the content of constituent communication – you can read the whole report online or a summary below.
WriteToThem.com is a long-running mySociety service that enables people across the UK to contact their elected representatives by entering their postcode and sending a message through the site.
This service provides a unique opportunity to understand the flow of communication between many constituents and many representatives. Our WriteToThem Insights report uses surveys to understand more about what people are writing about.
While previous work identified patterns in response rates and deprivation gradients, this experiment focuses on understanding what people are writing about, distinguishing between casework (individual problem-solving) and campaigning (policy-oriented advocacy).
A new survey and data-processing pipeline were developed to categorise and anonymise message summaries, applying machine learning and large language model techniques to cluster and label topics. Analysis of 5,400 messages from Q3 2025 found:
- Casework and campaigning form two distinct types of communication, with casework more common for councillors and campaigning dominant for MPs.
- The deprivation gradients of these two types differ sharply: campaigning is concentrated in less deprived areas, while casework is more evenly distributed, though likely still underrepresents the most deprived groups.
- First-time users are more likely to send casework messages and to receive responses.
- Top themes in casework include housing, local services, health, and anti-social behaviour; in campaigning, issues such as Gaza, climate policy, and digital ID predominate.
This data has limits. This covers only a portion of total correspondence, and with little information about whether the sample is representative enough to generalise to messages sent in general. That said, we think there are strong uses both for improving WriteToThem itself and for informing broader understanding of constituent communication.
We want to build on this work: refining the analysis process and exploring opportunities to collaborate. We see particular value in digging more into casework data as something that could inform more systematic approaches in this area, helping representatives across the country join up information and improve collective scrutiny of government services.
The full report can be read here.
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Image: Christopher Burns
