Customisable tool for writing to your MP: http://www.writetothem.com/about-branded

… sorry, also meant to add this page: http://www.writetothem.com/about-linktous

Mixing together a couple of your suggestions, a petition widget would be helpful. The Hardest Hit site had a petition link, but it wasn’t one embeddable in other sites, which as a shame, as part of the success was based on a broad wide web presence, so shareable/duplicable widgets could have appeared on many sites.
Mailing lists are iffier to share, because of data protection, and the consents given when people sign up in one place are not necessarily transferable.

Banner ads for your political website, obv.

7 proxies and a low orbit ion cannon (but never at the same time…)

Act.ly for your targeted Tweeting needs. They have an embed for sign up buttons and collate all directed Tweets into a Twitter petition page. Free tool run by the company that make campaign software NationBuilder.

A couple times now for building initial mailing lists on short order I’ve simply used a Google Docs “Form” which is easy to lay up (Name, Email, etc) and securely collect contact info with embedding script. You can then drop that data into anything, like Mail Chimp which is fairly cheap to send mass mail – free until your list gets above 2K.

With petitions to prompt contacting their interested contacts I’d be inclined to put a contact mechanism on the landing page after you’ve signed, because not everyone will want to do both. In self-hosted WordPress – which I highly recommend for abundance of free plugins which can be used in serial to create this kind of tool – I’d use one of many free petitions plugins, then drop folk back on a landing page where you then creatively use a plugin like Shareaholic (or do a WordPress plugin search for stuff like “socialize”) so people can spread the word.

I would guess that most people still do not get their news and much information online. Newspapers, magazines and TV are still the media that influence opinion. Hence much campaigning still takes the form of paper through the letter-box.

As the AV campaign showed, when it comes to paper campaigning, big money wins.

I’ve been wondering if there would be enough people (say, one per street) for a network of local campainers who would take responsibility for printing and distributing newsletters (at regular but not too frequent intervales) from pdfs produced centrally?

This would take a lot of organisation, but I’d do my bit – including bearing the cost as far as possible – in my own street for worthwhile causes.

Is this a sensible idea, or is it unrealistic?

@8. I reckon such newsletters would get ‘filed’ along with pizza flyers etc as they came through the letterbox.

Trying to post this again… ;o)

I’ve chatted about this several times with people in several contexts (as a director of mySociety, as an Advisor to the Open Rights Group and as a founder of NO2ID, in particular, though I’m commenting here in a personal capacity).

It shouldn’t be terribly difficult to put together an interface to all the services that already exist — some of them are provided already by mySociety as Richard Pope has pointed out already, but there are other services that together aren’t that difficult to manage.

Once I’m less busy at work (gimme about a month), I’d be happy to meet and chat in a pub with you or something; I’m sure there are plenty of other people who’d be interested in helping set up a resource to make online tools easier to use for campaigners. Drop me a note on Twitter and we can work something out…