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TheyWorkForYou

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We want MPs to meet the standards and expectations of the people who elected them - you!

TheyWorkForYou started twenty years ago as a volunteer project, when a bunch of people got together to make Parliament more transparent. We don’t have to wait for a better politics to be given to us – we can work together to make it happen now.

These sites need attention every day to:

  • Keep the data flowing and ensuring that the comprehensive data about politicians is up to date.
  • Make improvements such as recent changes to voting records.
  • Provide support on how to use the sites and the data we provide - we’re here for you.

And that's not enough: we want to experiment with new approaches like our new campaign (WhoFundsThem.com) to uncover the influence of money in politics.

This is an example of one of mySociety’s innovative projects. To support this and other similar work donate below.

I want to be a mySociety supporter

There are three key ways you can support mySociety, and our work on projects like TheyWorkForYou.

I want to make a substantial contribution

We’re looking for generous supporters to help us build our supporter network.

For instance, we’re looking for donations to:

  • Support match funding for supporters, to help people’s money go further (e.g. you give us £1,000 to make 100 people’s £10 into £20).
  • Support volunteer coordination time to run crowdsourcing projects.

If you’re interested in working with us to make this happen, please get in touch with Alice, our head of Fundraising at [email protected].

I am a representative of a trust or foundation

We have a variety of project ideas we'd love to discuss, and are especially interested in developing new relationships around improving our public education role. Please get in touch with Alice, our head of Fundraising at [email protected].

I work for an organisation that uses your service already

There’s three things you can do to help us:

  • Share your story with us, so we can help make a stronger case for our impact.
  • Share our campaigns with your supporters and networks - and tell them how supporting us supports you.
  • Corporate donations can help us with match funding.

Please sign up to our mailing list to keep in touch, or drop Alex a line about how you’re using our services at [email protected].

Why does mySociety need donations for these sites?

Running TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem needs attention every day. We need to do work to:

  • Keeping our comprehensive database of politicians (from local councillors to MPs) up to date.
  • Fixing errors in data published by the UK Parliaments and Assemblies to keep the data flowing.
  • Maintaining all the servers behind the scenes that help us send hundreds of thousands of emails a year
  • Reviewing votes and updating our voting summaries.
  • Reactive work to adjust the site and our explanations when political changes make our information out of date.
  • Providing support to users on how to use the sites and the data we provide.

And a lot of this is just to deliver tomorrow the same kind of service we delivered yesterday. That's not enough: we don't think we are reaching the full potential of TheyWorkForYou, and want to be bolder and experiment with new approaches.

What will you do with more support?

We’ve been looking back on 20 years of mySociety and TheyWorkForYou and the problems we originally set out to solve.

We’re proud of our work and the impact we’ve had - but British politics is not in a good state, and there’s so much more to do.

We think a secretive approach to governing and decision-making is at the root of many of our problems as a country. We also think we can do something about it.

Working with people across the country, we can make how British politics works more understandable and transparent, and empower people working to make better decisions. We want to be a lever, that we operate on behalf of our fellow citizens, to shift how politics works.

Your support is about helping us rise to meet the challenges we face, to make TheyWorkForYou and our other services equal to the challenges of the next twenty years.