Engaging your campaigners with data Will Brett – Electoral Reform Society John Robertson – Links Street Digital

How much is your vote worth Part of ERS ‘Penny for your vote’ campaign Used publicly available data All votes are not created equal! Some voters in Britain are valued 22 times more than others

to target, sort of We trick the ‘message’ by not sending it to anyone. Uses EN’s constituency mapping to postcodes with reference data. Minimalist form to drive large amount of engagement.

Reference data Westminster MP database. Add columns for data and narrative. Reference data added to the ‘message’. Submit button hidden Link to membership form

Sharing Reference data inserted into Tweets and Facebook posts. Javascript required when adding reference data to a URL

Creating reference data Download MP database here Upload your new spreadsheet here

Outcomes Action was taken over 16,500 times, a record for ERS Membership recruitment in August-September 2013 was up 135% Massive engagement on Twitter led to 320% increase in new followers (compared to previous two months) Tool embedded on Mail Online site – unusual for ERS! NB: no data capture meant no sign-ups, but potential to relaunch pre-election Follow-ups possible: every time there’s a by-election, we do it again!

The name game How many MPs since 1945 have had the same first name as you? Parliament needs to look more like the people it represents. If you want to be an MP, it helps if you’re called John, David or William.

The technical bits to target action. Set up contact data set with match to user’s first name. Very few columns – first name, address (use any) and a number (occurences of name at Westminster).

The technical bits 2 On form submission we output the ‘number’ (and hide it with CSS) in a ‘message’. Some javascript takes the number then displays appropriate copy blocks.

Sharing Javascript outputs share text after processing number Tweets are fully personalised.

Name Game - Outcomes Over 16,000 page views (similar to ‘How much is your vote worth’) but only 5,092 actions taken Feedback: some concerns about data harvesting Challenge: combining ‘fun’ with a serious message Unsolicited media pick-up

Thank you for listening!