I got the call 10 minutes before Rishi Sunak stepped into the rain to call the election: “We need you, can you start work right now?” Within an hour I had built the spreadsheet, imported in some initial data and started calling members. By the next day I had merged in more data from from internal systems, emails, old spreadsheets and more. By the end of the campaign I had made 750 calls, spoken with 415 people and had 100+ whatsapp conversations. I built, encouraged and organized a team of 150 volunteers who knocked doors, stuffed envelopes and made calls to help our candidate win. We won by 902 votes.
Playing keepy-uppy
The biggest challenge in this job wasn’t chatting to the lovely Labour Party members (I love a chat!!) The challenge was keeping on top of the volume of information coming in each day, from many different places, and then being able turn it around and use it to meet the shifting demands of the campaign without much idea what the next request would be.
The “data” was a bit more nuanced than in my usual Software Testing work, but thankfully my experience setting up phone banking infrastructure for Momentum helped me make the right decisions early. I knew what to record and what to drop: for example recording when a person was last reached is important but recording that they’re away for less than a week is not.
By the end of the campaign I had five extensive spreadsheets. I started with a membership master-list with calling data and volunteer interests, then as the campaign intensified I created a more targeted list of volunteers to encourage to get more engaged. In the last 5 days I worked of an ultra targeted list, broken down by area, which included things like teller shifts at poling stations and expected arrival times of volunteers.
Inclusive approach
My approach in community management roles is to enable as diverse a group as possible to join in. In an election campaign there is a lot of “leg work” which isn’t an option for everyone, including myself. I paid particular attention to enabling and encouraging those who could do admin work, phone calls, envelope stuffing and leaflet delivery but who felt unable to do canvasing. This gave us 20 volunteers dedicated to admin, 30 phone bank volunteers and 20 leafleters. These volunteers also helped us make sure that those who could canvas would be able to just focus on that high impact activity.
WhatsApp?
Working outside tech sector for the first time in a while, I was a little lost without Slack and Notion, and lord there wasn’t a Scrum or a Retro in sight. Organizing with volunteers is different also, they’re not on payroll and if communicating with you is inconvenient many just won’t engage. Therefore, almost all of my organizing was done on Whatsapp.
I set up a group for each area in our whatsapp community. The onboarding went something like this: I added people to their area “in real time” while chatting with them on the phone, welcomed them with a personal message, then I updated the groups about upcoming canvassing sessions daily and regularly asked if anyone had any questions (which they often did.) But on top of this, the main thing that worked was messaging people one on one, getting to know them, checking in after they’d been out canvassing, reminding them of next sessions. It was intense and took a lot of headspace but a lot of fun!
Big stake out!
While speaking to our volunteers and members of the public I got permission for 300+ garden stakes and window posters. I kept the list up to date and organized, liaised with with the volunteers putting up the stakes up and regularly updated the campaign team of progress.
Regional differences
Another interesting challenge was that Pendle and Clitheroe is a new constituency, and this was the first general election. Spanning both sides of Pendle hill, this new Constituency Labour Party is made of branches with their own ways of doing things, their own strengths, histories and local difficulties.
I needed to understand just enough to know who to call, be sensitive and to not duplicate work, yet not get too distracted by learning all the details. The campaign was only six weeks of course!
Winning
Doing behind the scenes work with minimal supervision is a quiet privilege. Getting on with the job and making sure everyone on “the front line” has exactly what they need is something I take pride in. I achieved exactly what I set out to in this job, which is immensely satisfying.
