A common action nonprofit organizations ask their constituents to make is to submit letters to the editor (LTEs) to their local newspaper. Webform allows you a quick and easy way to do this through its conditional recipients feature and the ability to theme the emails sent out from the form. With these two features in particular, a user can not only select which newspapers to send their letter to but also make the email sent out look like a normal email sent through an email client.

Detailed instructions: http://dharmatech.org/ideas/2009/creating-letter-editor-form-drupal

Essentially, what you'll need to do is use Webform's conditional recipients feature and create a "select" type component called "newspaper." The client defines the newspapers in their area/region and the email addresses for LTE submissions. Once the form is accessible to anonymous users, people begin to fill it out and only the newspapers the user selects will receive an email.

To make the email sent to a newspaper look like a normal email, you'll have to theme the email. Instructions provided here:

You may be interested in a nifty jQuery word counter. The general rule of thumb with LTEs is to keep them to 250 words. With this word counter, the user has an idea how many words s/he has typed in real time. Instructions on how to do this with webform: http://dharmatech.org/ideas/2009/adding-word-counter-webform

Last, if you have the Node Export module http://drupal.org/project/node_export installed and enabled, you can simply import this code to create your sample LTE webform!
Code is attached.

AttachmentSize
lte_sample_webform.txt9.09 KB

Comments

seanr’s picture

You may want to check out my Letters module. It allows you to set up a list of newspapers people can write to and will allow them to enter their zip code to fine papers near them. Once they've written a littler, it will email their letter to the selected newspaper. If you use the CRMAPI and CRMNGP modules for integration with NGP's Campaign Office Online, it will also create a contact record in your database and assign a field code to it with the subject of their letter in the description field.

Robin Millette’s picture

I used this method for a client but soon discovered we needed to verify the email address users were providing since we had it setup to send mails as if they came from that provided address. I wrote a module, Webform Confirm Email Address that does just that.

I would appreciate any feedback if you decide to give it a try.

dharmatech’s picture

Nice work Robin!

kevinwalsh’s picture