This Tool Will Make Writing To Your Reps Easier

With a depressingly long list of major bills flooding congress, there has never been a better time to let your elected officials know where you stand — but crafting a good action letter can present its own challenges. Enter: MyLetter.to, a new tool that helps you write to your reps and sends the personalized note via snail mail straight to the right desk. The letter writing service studiously avoids the pitfalls of typical form letters, making each one unique and affecting a professional yet conversational tone with plenty of facts to back up arguments. Whether you wish to voice concerns over the challenges to ACA or the newly proposed budget pushing forward the Mexico border wall and pumping up military spending at the expense of the EPA, affordable housing, NEA and public radio, MyLetter can help.

The micro-lobbying service entirely automates connecting with politicians by crafting, printing, and physically mailing the letter to your intended recipient at a $2 charge (less than a latte!). With six simple taps of the mouse, you can have your name attached to a well-crafted letter in under 60 seconds — meaning no more writer's block, no more searching high and low for a stamp, and no more excuses!

To start crafting your letter, simply visit the site's homepage displaying popular politicians such as President Trump and Paul Ryan. The site also gives users the option to look up their local reps by entering their zip code. Once the political recipient is determined, you are able to select from a list of two dozen trending topics, such as the legalization of marijuana, gun reform, immigration, and climate change, which are continually updated. After entering your stance on the subject (signified by a thumb's up or thumb's down), the site prompts you to choose three key reasons to support your stance. Enter your contact information, and mere seconds later you have an intelligently-crafted letter. There are 45 million letter variations the service can currently produce, The Daily Dot reports, so no two are exactly alike.

The service, launched this past January, hopes to help constituents translate their emotions into words — so when your feeling state is "literally screaming" you can still be politically productive. "The thing that drove us to build the system is, in the moment, people can be very angry about politics, but they don’t really have a way to channel that," lead software developer John Berry told The Beach Reporter. “The point of the application is to give them an outlet to actually have an impact that takes very little time and effort.”

While some may posit that streamlining civic engagement can take away from the hand-written letter's power, getting opinions on to paper, crowding politicians' doorsteps can make a difference. By freeing these thoughts from the social media echo chamber, they become pretty darn hard to ignore — and that definitely seems worth $2.