Relaunch required

Labour’s web strategy must change

‘Labour must put the internet at the heart of its strategy if we're to win the next election.' That statement may sound like a cliché, and one would think that the leaders of the party already understand that to ignore the internet in an age when two-thirds of the population have regular access to the web means to risk losing vital votes (putting other political conditions aside) at the next general election. However, the recent relaunch of Labour.org.uk has shown, if one is cynical, that the web is little more than a tool to capture email addresses and postcodes of the unsuspecting public.

Countless times we've heard that the Labour party must learn from the lessons of our American counterparts. When I worked at party headquarters under Tony Blair's leadership, senior leaders appeared to understand the need to learn from Howard Dean's online campaign of 2004, one of the big turning points in online campaigning. And Barack Obama's online success has created a new beacon for us to follow in our endeavour to make the party a potent force in online campaigning.

The problem, however, is that Labour is not following the examples set by Obama, just as it always struggled to learn from Dean's lessons.

There is no secret alchemy to successful online campaigning that only our American cousins know. I argue that the keys to online success are: first, omnipresence: utilising all available and appropriate channels to communicate with people; second, engagement: inviting people to speak back to the party, and demonstrating that those voices are being heard; and, third, clarity: using good design and writing to argue for our values and policies.

To go further, you may argue that fostering a unique online community for party supporters is a good idea, and I would agree, but nowadays this should happen by building on top of platforms such as Facebook and not by developing clumsy platforms like MembersNet (previously known as MpURLs) which are seldom used. Facebook, MySpace and Bebo have all opened up their platforms to outside developers; this is where Labour should be investing resources into building its own online community.

Part of any good online campaign strategy is to capture people's email addresses, but Labour's new website presents a data-capture form on almost every click (at least for the juicy resources). By doing this, Labour decisionmakers risk offending any potential supporters, thus reducing the actual amount of email addresses and postcodes ‘captured' which can be put to good use. Seeing the web as a tool to grab contact details is naive at best, cynical at worst.

So what can we do as a party to turn things around and put the internet in its right place as a vital communication and engagement tool?

We should start by organising a conference of Labour-supporting technology and internet experts. This event would bring recognised experts together with the most senior party decisionmakers. By this I don't mean directors and managers at party headquarters, but the party leader, deputy leader and similar figures. These decisionmakers have been in power too long to truly understand how to get the best out of modern technology and campaigning methods, and they are reliant on poor advice in order to grasp the subject.

Further, Labour should set up an Internet Advisory Board which would meet regularly to discuss the web strategy, track progress of goals and to bring new ideas and fresh perspectives into the decisionmaking process. The board's make-up would include industry leaders and experts; people who deal with new technology every day and who have the ability to convince senior management of where the party is going wrong online, and how the situation can be improved.

Finally, the internal structure of the party must change to recognise changing times and the new importance of technology. From personal experience as a change-agent in the party headquarters, I can say that the current structure is not conducive to innovation. The guardians of the old media approach to communication rule the roost, which makes little sense at a time when people are reading less and the television news channels are more hostile to Labour ‘spin'.

I understand that it is difficult to change the status-quo in any organisation which has been managed by the same generation of leaders for more than a decade. It is notoriously hard to change the ways of a party that has governed for so long. However, there are people in the wider party with the ideas that could help Labour win online at the next general election, and to make the party more responsive and democratic, and fresh, by putting the internet at the heart of what we do not just at election time.

Gordon Brown is perhaps the most technology-savvy prime minister we have had, and his current position means that risks can be taken in order to find better ways to communicate and engage with party supporters and non-supporters on a wider level. I hope we learn the lessons in time.

Luke Bozier is the former e-campaigns manager for the Labour party. Email lukecb [at] rednarrative.com

Comments

Posted by Paul Simpson on 14 October 2008, 1:32:03 PM

I agree with Luke that 'There is no secret alchemy to successful online campaigning that only our American cousins know' and his central thrust about how to run a successful online campaign. However, I think he is wrong on the data capture issue. How much priority to give to data capture in any campaigning, online or otherwise, is always a judgment call. However, I feel the differences between the US and UK political systems play an important factor in making data capture more important to UK than US campaigners. Whether we like it or not the UK political systems gives much importance to those electors who live in marginal constituencies. Also while US campaigners can structure campaigns around Obama and McCain safe in the knowledge that electors will go to the polling booths and see their names on the ballot paper at a general election that is not the case in the UK. While elector’s decisions are obviously effected to a huge extent by the respective party leaders, however, ultimately the UK electorate will go into a polling booth and vote for his or her respective MP. Also, unlike in America, there is no list of registered party supporters. Parties in the UK need to build this data themselves and work continuously to keep it up to date. Given this any political campaigns, especially those conducted at a national level, need to capturing the contact details of possible supporters, and the geographical location so they can focus resources effectively and allow MPs to develop a relationships with possible local supporters. Given this I think Luke is being a little harsh to say the least on the new labour.org.uk site.

Internet Advisory Board? The Party has had people from all the major American campaigns tell them what to do, and we always get the "well, the Party can't really give up all that control" or "we only want to engage with Party members" speeches thrown back at us. I agree with Paul, above - if you want to engage with people, you have to know who they are, and build a relationship on top of that. The trouble is, the Party doesn't currently reconcile their online-offline mechanisms. On the web, we're big on hype. We just don't follow up with offline action. I'm not holding my breath for a change of the old-media old guard, anytime soon.

Well the point of all this is that these three things should be taken as one. Any kind of new advisory group wouldn't work without the structural change. I know we have had American advisers in, but there's no impetus on decision-makers to heed their advice. If there was a root-branch look at how we communicate as a party in the light of technology developments, any decent advice we get, should in theory be acted upon. The problem is that the party leader has no real reason to get involved in the nitty-gritty of online campaigning, and the directors at HQ have no real reason to take the risks and really push things forward. If the senior politicians could be convinced of the need for change, there would effectively be a light under the bottoms of the decision-makers! Just for the record, I'm not against data-capture, just the overt way it's currently being done. People see it for what it is, and they don't like it. And that defeats the initial point of doing it.

If we are to take forward key messages then a website alone is not the only answer but part of the base to build on. We should move to a more fluid approach by incorporating articles via the website by leading Labour MPs or related supporters. Those articles could then form the main basis of a Labour's own blog and related public or left leaning blogs. In doing so it would maximise the numbers of potential people who would have access. More importantly it would help set a wider debate that the press would find hard to distort. With Facebook pages should be seen as a way of bypassing censorship of the press by focusing on up to date issues. The ready made forums create the debate and the numbers of people that can join gives the party the ability to keep the issues live. The key to Facebook is its ease of use. It should be seen as additional pages to the website and not in competition. 2% of the UK population are registering with Facebook every week. We need to see net use as not just a single application of a website but by how people use the net and how it can be linked together. For years we have raised concerns about how the media and press distort our messages and how they fail even to report most issues. These combined approaches could create the ability for our messages to reach the public. So Luke is right these potentials for the party do need greater thought and its an opportunity we should not overlook.

From a mundane, people-connect point of view, I must admit I feel that the new/current format is more suited for sitting MPs and party members rather than for disseminating local news exposing Tory propaganda. The old Web-in-a-Box format, though not very campaign-savvy, had a better newsy feel to it which the general public liked. [See the now-dormant www.wimbledonlabour.org.uk site for proof.]

I've been blogging for a while both on MpURLs/Members Net and on Google's Blogger.com platform. There's a significant difference - and I don't mean technologically. You can say things quite freely within Members Net which perhaps you'd be less likely to feel comfortable about doing on the outside. I think the principle of Members Net - a mostly private place for members only - needs to be defended a little more than it has been. It's a good long-term way of adding value to the membership experience - and acting as an incubator for a more profoundly diverse external Labour blogosphere in the future. We need more ways than this of adding value, of course, of attracting supporters back into the fold. But this way'll work eventually. And yes. It's true that we could use Facebook. But someone, somewhere, once remarked on the importance of owning the means of production. :-)

Miljenko, while I understand your concerns, I think it fundamentally misconceives the way new services and political opportunities develop on the web. No matter how talented any political organisations web development team are, they will never be able to provide the range and variety of services that can satisfy the imaginaton and desires of a diverse and broad supporter-base. There are two real problems, one to do with experitse and resources, the other ideological. The expertise and resources one is obvious. We wouldn't expect Labour to have in-house plumbers working for them; they would hire these services in. We wouldn't even necesserily assume they would haev in-house pollsters - they would contract such activities out. The reason being that, in both cases, it is a more efficient use of their resources to do so. Likewise, it seems strange that to argue that what is, in the general scheme of things, a relatively small organisation would be capable of providing the level and reliability of service of a compang like Facebook or Google, who are the best in the world at doing what they do. But I also have an ideological problem with your approach. The most exciting bit of the Internet is its openness and the ability it gives individuals to be creative and engage in their own content production and then, collectively, content organisation (just as a throwaway, my fave video on the subject: http://snurl.com/4kkw8). If they are controlled through traditional, top-down, command and control, "the man knows best" mechanisms, they will be completely unfit for purpose and fail to engage a whole generation of citizens who have come to expect that level of interactivity and openess in everything they do - be it buying books, uploading photos and videos, accessing the news, even online dating. Instead, political organisations need to develop a culture which is nimble and responsive to a rapidly developing online culture. They need to be an element within a wider online eco-system and capable of assimilating sites like Facebook, YouTube or whatever else may come next into its plans and strategies.

Hi Nick - ideologically I agree with you. Open source software is a perfect example of the positively rapacious results of online openness and freedom. But practically, in terms of building political teams and developing political strategies and tactics in consonance with members' wishes, I still think we need a semi-private place (ie not in the public domain) to debate, develop and grow. If something like Members Net was set up to allow for user control of the code (and thus the site's constitution) and integration with publicly available technologies, then we could have the best of both worlds.