Help us email the school board!

May 26, 2017 8:29 AM

I'm involved in my school's PTO. I would like to set up a website where people can put in their email address, select which people they want to email (school board reps, state representatives or senators, etc), and then click a button to email them. I would like to do this easily and for free. Is that possible?

My son attends a small school in a large school district, and recently there have been budget cuts and changes that disproportionately affect my kid's school. I would like to set up a site where parents can just select which school board rep is theirs, maybe copy-and-paste a message into a field, and send them a message. It would be awesome if I could also include state politicians who make funding decisions about our district. I would like to make this as easy as possible for parents to do. I see these used ALL THE TIME by political action groups, so I know it's possible!

Even though I know it's possible, but I can't figure out how. Can I set up something to do this easily and for free? It doesn't matter if it looks pretty, I just want it to be easy to use. If not, are there phrases or key words I could use to seek someone to build this for me?

posted by christinetheslp to Technology (4 answers total)

One thing to keep in mind is that you have to prevent people from using the site to try to send spam or the like. Anything that appears to send e-mail will be crawled by automated tools that will send possibly thousands of e-mails through it. Make sure that your solution includes mitigation for this.
posted by Candleman at 9:12 AM on May 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

You can probably do it with Form.io
posted by COD at 9:34 AM on May 26, 2017

As a parent advocate who has tried to find a similar service- the ones big organizations use cost major money. The only thing we have been able to find that does this is formdesk.
posted by momochan at 6:16 PM on May 26, 2017

School boards work differently in different states. In my state, emailing an individual board member would be frowned upon (not saying that doesn't happen) since they basically function as a group as a whole. A preferred option is requesting to be on the agenda at the board meeting or to speak during comment period of the meeting. Your area may differ.
posted by tamitang at 9:08 PM on May 27, 2017