1. General reflections Jon Havens and Lucy Barnett, Macmillan Cancer Support
7th March 2018

2. Campaign objective
For prospective parliamentary candidates to agree they support our calls, and if elected, will make sure that people with cancer get the support they need.
Elections are a great opportunity to influence candidates through campaigning, and mobilise campaigners. Our campaign supported the wider objective which was to achieve a commitment from the next Government to implement our calls.
This cut across the public affairs team objectives, which were:
The lives of people with cancer will be improved when the next Government implements the calls
Achieve a commitment from the next Government to implement our calls
Increase the number of Macmillan supporters in the next Parliament
In order to achieve this, we are asking our campaigners to:
their prospective parliamentary candidates to ask them to support our calls
We’ll then ask our campaigners to meet with their candidates in person
We also want to ensure:
- Campaigners are provided with the tools to take action and contact candidates (e.g. candidates, request face to face meetings, organise hustings)
- Macmillan’s GE priorities (workforce, money and cancer, end of life) are brought to life through compelling communications

3. Now we’d spent a lot of time growing support from government for our calls, so it was important to make sure we didn’t lose that support because of the General Election. So we decided to launch a campaign asking prospective MPs to show support for three of our key calls, and these were around end of life, welfare and the cancer workforce.

4. Actions A choice of four actions, split by campaign issue
Personal stories
Built in legacy tool
Local cancer data
Candidate sign up links in from supporter
Intro
We decided to go down the route of an to candidates action, focusing around the 3 key issues in our manifesto – welfare / workforce / EOL / manifesto.
Because we have quite distinct and engaged groups of supporters on these issues:-
We gave campaigners the choice of 3 stories to share with their local candidates, one for each of our election calls (welfare, workforce, end of life care). They was also a 4th version about our manifesto / all 3 calls.
The messages to candidates included real stories from people affected, and we asked people to personalise their s as much as possible to make their s stand out.
The messages included individual’s bespoke links for each candidate to sign up – by clicking this link they’d be taken to a sign up form (built in ‘political’ tool) to sign up)
We had cancer prevalence data for every constituency in England/NI, and nation specific data for Wales/Scotland. So we could make sure candidates understood how many people there are in their area with cancer, and how many more people there will be over the next 15 years.
The message being sent to candidates was also varied, based on whether the candidate has already signed up to the campaign – i.e. if you lived in an area where your candidate had already signed up, the template we provided to send them would have more focus on signing up to other campaign features, such as our Twitter day of action.
The target list, bringing together:
Top target and marginal seats
MPs we’ve ranked as 4s and 5s – our strongest advocates
Candidates in safe seats where the incumbent is standing down
Our approach for prospective party candidates:
ing candidates from all parties in our top target constituencies with an ask to pledge their support to Macmillan
For constituencies in England, sharing data on the local population living with cancer
Sharing our manifesto calls
Also using this opportunity to ask questions to new candidates about their interest in cancer and health policy
Highlighting the upcoming Twitter day of action on 1 June

5. Welfare example

6. General manifesto example

7. List of candidates example

8. Copy example –
Local data
Link to sign up for candidate

9. Personalised TY page example

10. Mass emails Mass emails
We launched our campaign on 16th May, and segmented our campaigners by the four UK nations. In order to meet our aims, we launched our campaign through an ‘ to target’ action which enabled campaigners to easily identify their candidates and customise a template asking them to sign up to support Macmillan’s calls.
Over the 3 and a half weeks that campaign action was live, we sent 29 s to campaigners and supporters, and 3 s to candidates. The initial reached 0.5m people.
Generally, s performed very well. 478,224 s were sent via CRM and 79,835 via Engaging Networks; open rates on both beat their targets (CRM 15.89% against a target of 13.5%, EN 20.05% against target of 16%). EN s did really well – 27 s, average 19% open rate. 7% click through
We sent a reminder 10 days later to campaigners who had not opened the launch .

11. Constituency targeting
Two days before the election, we targeted constituencies where campaigners hadn’t yet contacted candidates.
Telling campaigners that we still needed to reach target seats encouraged more of them to take action
Sending campaigners s to say that we hadn’t reached all of our target seats led to an additional 77 constituencies being reached. We told people about our strategy, saying ‘nobody in your area has taken action’ which is bold wording.
We also changed tack and encouraged people to send our manifesto, once we had looked at the Google Analytics for the first few weeks of the campaign.

12. Sign up form for candidates
Political
So we wanted to make it as easy as possible for candidates to get involved so we built a candidate sign-up page for candidates to sign up to our calls in the ‘political feature’
It meant we could:
Link our supporter actions with candidate support, and vary the messages supporters were sending to candidates.
Encourage candidates to share why they were supporting the campaign – really useful intelligence for our public affairs team in the new parliament as platform to begin new conversation with MPs.
We could integrate social sharing in the journey for candidates too so they used our template tweet

13. “ ” I am delighted to support the campaign.
Macmillan provides a wonderful resource which I have witnessed at first hand.
I can personally attest to the empathy, compassion and professionalism of the nurses who came to my home and to whom I will always be grateful. ”
And here’s an example of the comments candidates left about the campaign.

14. Twitter day of action
s to candidates
Planned for a date but the attack in Manchester meant we had to postpone and send another asking people not to do it due to the break in campaigning.
Great response from candidates, the pictures speak for themselves…

15. Political
We used the political tool to our candidates too – including a sign-up link for them to back our manifesto

16. Results 91% of constituencies reached
Target constituencies were agreed as those likely to change hands, and indeed, 50% of these did result in a new MP.
Target 1: reach candidates in 80% of constituencies through campaigner s.
Target 2: 1300 campaigners to take part.
Target 3: Reach 100% of target constituencies with s to candidates.
1729 campaigners took part, sending over s to candidates.
Reached 100% of target constituencies

17. #throwback to ENCC2017
We’ve also got an ‘Engaging with your candidates’ guide, which we used in a workshop at the Volunteer Conference on 19th May, and also sent out to our campaigners who have taken the action online. It’s a guide full of tips on meeting your candidates in person. The guide to engaging with candidates, sent to campaigners who had taken the action, had a very high open rate of 57.78%. The Twitter day of action to campaigners also performed highly with an open rate of 51.26%.
Thank you comms to campaigners
MP lookup tool in development to improve the depth of relationship between MPs and campaigners
Key tool for campaigners designed to make it easier for our more committed campaigners to share their personal stories with MPs – not using a template but in their own words
Launch due week commencing 12th June

18. Lessons learned Campaigners preferred the manifesto
Giving campaigners a choice of which call to prioritise in an to their MP didn’t result in much variation
Whilst campaigners were able to choose between sending their MP an highlighting a particular case study connected to one of our three calls, the majority initially chose to simply share the manifesto. When initial analytics showed this trend the Campaigns team focused on driving traffic directly to the manifesto action to maximise actions taken. The reason for the popularity of the manifesto action could be the result of a number of factors (page layout; campaigners feeling unwilling to choose one story over the others) and warrants further investigation by the Campaigns and Digital team.
It would be great to ask campaigners why they chose the manifesto over others – the manifesto was above the fold of the page and that probably had a big impact.
Worth having a lower level action for non-campaigners
Some policy calls can be challenging to make work for campaigners

19. “I'm waiting for the other campaigners to knock on my door
“I'm waiting for the other campaigners to knock on my door.  I'm so passionate as all the points in the manifesto are so dear to my heart… As you can see I tick all the boxes to be passionate when I speak to the candidates and I have printed off the manifesto and hopefully can be a useful tool for myself and for the people like myself who are and will be affected by cancer in years to come.”
Lucy
s from campaigners
Greens and UKIP loved the campaign, but conservatives not allowed to sign up to support or make any commitments. Kay is one of our most committed campaigners and we had this great exchange with her, and she had a really personal conversation with her candidate (who became her MP).
Preparing responses in advance and encouraging people to follow up with their candidates if they don’t respond.
Some people were receiving auto-responses set up by parties, so it was a case of planning on how to respond to these.
“Cancer care is an issue that matters personally to me for the reasons I discussed with you on the doorstep. I will read the Macmillan manifesto and, if I’m successful on 8 June, I’ll invite them to my office in Parliament to discuss it – I’ll let you know how that goes.”

20. Say hey sometime