Designer Workflow on Anonymous user

I have a public facing site with a "Contact Us" SharePoint list. Users are able to submit a new request through a custom Web Part which creates a SP List item using server side code.

After the list item is created, a SP Designer workflow is triggered and sends an email to the appropriate users.

In order to create the list item when there's no user logged in, I had to run the snippet with Elevated Privileges. Therefore, the SP List item is created under "System Account" and this is why I assume the workflow never starts.

1. Should I impersonate a specific user in my server side code when creating the item?


2. Should I send the email using code instead of using a SP Designer Workflow?

Any help would be greatly appreciated