Campaigning tool: simplifying the process for effective campaigns

We all have different ways of managing what we need to do. Sometimes we are more productive than others, some people have better systems than others, but the aim is the same: to get things done that demonstrates our commitment to making the area better and to the principles of the party. The solution focus approach has many tools which may assist in this aim and here is one which you may find useful:

Forms can be useful, and I am a believer in a forms being no longer than 1 page. What this form helps with is setting out the problem, seeing what has worked before (acknowledging that things have been tried and have worked, even if only limited) and what you want it to look like if things were perfect (this links to the principles of the party).

The scale is 0-10. 0 being as bad as it can get and 10 being as good as it can be. This allows you to see where you are at right now – your judgement. Your judgement is very important as this is what voters look for to see if you represent their views; the closer your judgements the more likely they will think you represent them.

The form should be worked on, with bits being filled as you go along, so you can learn from what works. It helps keep focused and on track. It can be used for any issue from increasing membership in your local party, to local issues like getting fly tipping removed. It is clear, simple and effective. Thanks to Appreciating Systems for its development. Any feedback welcome as to its use.

Local Campaign Focus Form: Simple approach to organising your thinking for a campaign

As we begin to look at the elections coming up in May, many will be looking to start or expand on local campaigns to help improve our chances of winning seats in the election. Organisation of the campaign is key to ensuring that it achieves what it sets out to. The problem with organising a campaign is the number of issues that can be focused on, including all the campaign materials that HQ send through. What we need is something which can focus our attention on the local issues. One technique that can help in this is to look at the worries of the local area, what is working well in the local area, including what people are proud of and once we know this we can look at what needs to happen in the campaign.

The worries are an important aspect of political campaigning and most politicians and local parties will know these well. We spend a lot of time listening to people and the problems they are facing and then look at what to do about it. This can be very effective and has been the cornerstone of community politics and the Lib Dems – keeping the focus local.

However, what is also very important is to honour what people appreciate in the area, what makes them like where they live. Focusing on the worries can often seem like running an area down. In may area we have high unemployment, high levels of deprivation (it is one of the most deprived areas in the country), and many things to complain about such as gangs and violence. But people still like living here. So this can be used as valuable campaigning material showing that we are standing up for the things locals enjoy and like.

These then focus our attention on what we need to do. This is a very simple process used in the solution focused approach and can be used with one piece of paper:

This is a first draft and I would welcome feedback on ideas, thoughts and criticisms to help improve it. The difference between this approach and what I have used before is the simplicity and the local focus. I know we have many resources and emails coming to us about what to put in our material, but this gives me a better focus about what needs to be in, rather than what I can put in because I have it. So to take an example:

The people in my area are not very concerned with some of the issues that we could focus on – such as the environment. While it is important and dear to my heart, the people in my area, at least those who I speak to, do not see it as a concern in this area right now. So it would be better for my local party to focus on other issues.

This approach seeks to simplify the way in which we match our campaign with local issues. It seeks to focus our thinking on the local issues. It seeks to simplify how to draw out what we need for a campaign. Let me know if you think this is something you think could be useful.

Conference will be reviewing May 2011 results but is only asking 50% of questions it should be: There is more to learn if we ask the right questions

At the Lib Dem Conference next week there will be a review of the May 2011 election (see document here) which asks some interesting questions but it only goes so far in asking the right questions to get all that we could learn. The review will be asking:

1. Was your candidate in place early enough? Did he or she campaign for long enough?

2. Were the methods of campaigning varied enough?

3. Did you produce enough literature? Was it of a good enough quality?

4. Do you feel there was enough emphasis on community politics?

5. Did we target correctly in your area? What lessons can we learn for the future?

6. Was support from Party Headquarters adequate? If not, how could it be improved?

7. How did you deal on the doorstep with the Liberal Democrats being in the coalitiongovernment?

8. Did you campaign purely on local issues or also on national issues? What worked best?

9. What more can be done to recruit extra activists and keep existing ones motivated?

10. Knowing what you know now, how will you fight the next set of elections differently?

11. How did holding the referendum on the same day affect:

                                      i: Turnout?

                                      ii. Activist priorities?

                                      iii. The result?

While these questions are important there are some equally important questions that we should be asking. You can learn a lot from asking about why went wrong, what we learnt and what we are going to do differently next time. This gives us what didn’t work. However, this is only half the story. We can also ask where what we did worked well (such as question 8) and come up with ‘what worked’.

In May 2011 what worked would be any local party who scored better than the average result.

These are the results for Scotland as they are available. Any local party who did better than a -14.23% from them didn’t do too badly given the context. There is some evidence that where the Lib Dems have an MP we did better, which is a generalisation that seems to have gained traction with many including those in the Tories as advertised in ConservativeHome:

The Liberal Democrats lost 40% of the council seats they were defending but did much better in places where they had an incumbent MP

But this is not strictly true. Taking Scotland as an example we did ‘well’ in areas where we don’t have an MP and poorly in areas we do e.g. Orkney. So this is not strictly true and so there is a lot to learn about what local parties have done to attract support/keep support in their areas which goes beyond the received wisdom. If we don’t ask these questions we lose important lessons.

I have been contacting local parties where I see a good result and ask them what they thought they did which attracted the support which was bucking the national trend. The main message I am getting is that it is due to the strength of the candidate but I feel there is more to it than that. We need to be asking more specific questions about what they are doing, how do they attract support, supporters, specifically. So I would like the review to ask:

Did your party beat the average national poll for the Lib Dems? / Did you do better than expectations? If so what did you do specifically which contributed to this result? What campaigning issues worked in your area? How did you choose them? What material did you use and how much do you think this contributed? What worked on the doorstep? How did you get this result?

Opinion Poll using the scaling question: Using it to improve campaigning

The scaling question is one of the more famous Solution Focused tools which is widely used now in all walks of life. It was developed as a tool to work with people to motivate them in a particular direction, or to at least identify how important things are to them. The beginning part of the tool is the one which people are most familiar with. This question has begun to be used more and more in politics, without ever really fulfilling the tools potential as it is never used fully. However, a recent opinion poll has again used it which shows some interesting results, which in turn would give us some important campaigning options.

The 2005 General Election had a turn out of about 61% while the 2010 turn out was about 65%. We could assume that those who scored the question an 8, 9 or 10 would have made up those who would vote in a General Election. While those scoring lower are less likely to vote verging on probably not going to. So while this is interesting for pollsters who use it for weighting their opinion polls, it offers campaigners a different slant.

Put simply, as a campaigner you want to know if you are wasting your time or not on talking to someone. In campaigning in general you may not make a destinction between someone you think would vote and someone who won’t as all conversations can be important. However, in targeted campaigning you make a judgement about whether they are likely to vote or not, and if not you move on (Obama used this extensively). But using the scaling question you can guide your judgement and potentially increase people to an 8, 9 or 10.

By asking the question (as asked by Ipsos-MORI) you get a baseline for where someone is at regarding voting. Where MORI stop there, you could go on to ask some questions to see if there is anything you could do to get them to the polling booth:

Q: Have you ever been at an 8 or 9 before? If so, what was different about then?

This gives you an idea about what needs to happen for this person to go and vote and if you can do anything to help

Q: What was your highest score? Did you go to vote at this score?

This tells you their scoring. If may be that they would go to vote at a 6 and so you could ask what needs to happen to get there? and if there is anything you can do to assist.

Q: What would need to happen to move up one point?

This gets them thinking about small steps that they would want to see to start moving towards going to vote and you can see if you can assist.

These types of questions get you into a positive dialogue about going to vote and steps to make it happen – which may be practical, political, or other reason – and gets you on their side in terms of making it happen. It maybe that they say 0 or 1 and you will get a quick answer to your question about whether you are wasting your time or not. It could help and could get a few more to the polling booths?

Lessons the Neo-Cons can teach the Lib Dems about political strategy

Image via Wikipedia

Karl Rove is not the most popular figure in liberal Britain and it may not be a surprise that The Telegraph has started to look at him for ideas to reinvent the Tory Party. However, there are some distinct similarities between what Mr Rove and the Lib Dems have done to increase their respective votes and he offers the Lib Dems some important lessons in developing a voter base.

In The Telegraph’s piece How Karl Rove could save the Conservative Party there is some praise for the Lib Dems

it’s also worth looking at the Liberal Democrats. When they were a rising force in the land, they would win council seats, and sometimes whole local authorities, by co-opting community organisers into their party. They’d find a campaigner – a tenant, a resident or a parent – with a grievance and say, “If you really want to change things, you need to get elected as a councillor”. When the inevitable response came – “but I’m not political” – Lib Dem activists confessed honestly that they weren’t, either. This worked

They go on to suggest that this was in fact the same strategy that Karl Rove used to improve the Republican Party’s situation. Rove sought to identify ‘social leaders’ – people who have influence in their social sphere. His team would go into an area with no, or very weak, Republican Party activism and seek a significant local figure – a headteacher or a doctor – and ask if they would like to become chairman of the local Republicans. The person would invariably reply that they were apolitical, but were then asked about their beliefs and values and often found that these matched those of the Republican Party. Once they accepted the new role, the person was then managed vigorously, sacked if they failed to meet performance targets and rewarded for success – the more telephone canvassing they organised, for example, the closer they got to the front of the president’s rally. Likewise, a Christmas card from the president was real currency, saved for high performers.

Another strategy Rove used was to attract young Americans by buying advertising space where they would see it such as in front of running machines at gyms. They then looked for natural leaders – the two or three people who were the hubs of social activity – had the same conversation about values and these young leaders soon realised that they had been Republicans all along.

Karl Rove understood the most basic rule of marketing – if people aren’t coming to you, go and find them.

This strategy worked – in 2000 the presidential election was so close it came down to a technicality. In 2004 President Bush won a second term with a margin of four million votes. The Lib Dems could learn from this and in many ways have a head start from other Parties as they have been doing this to some extent already. The difference was a focus on values and beliefs and it is here that the Lib Dems have a bigger advantage.

British attitudes have become more liberal (or here) as time has gone on and so there is more scope to attract social leaders who are influencing these views and attitudes which should be reflected well in the Liberal Democrat Party. By identifying and co-opting social leaders with liberal attitudes would be a good strategy to start increasing the liberal vote in Britain.

Improving local campaigning: Polling location influences how you vote

What would you say influenced your voting decisions in the most recent local or national election? People generally answer with ‘rational’ factors. Yet Stanford Graduate School of Business have shown that a much more subtle and arbitrary factor may also play a role—the location of the polling booth in which you happen to vote.

Using data from US general elections they discovered that people who voted in schools were more likely to support raising the state sales tax to fund education. This effect persisted even when the researchers controlled for, or removed the possibility of, other factors such as:

• Where voters lived. People who have kids may be pro-education and more likely to live near, and hence vote at, schools;
• Political views. Those who voted for Gore or positively on other propositions; and
• Demographics including age, sex, etc.

No matter how they analysed the data, the researchers found that voters in schools were more likely to support extra funding for education.

Environmental cues, such as objects or places, can activate related constructs within individuals and influence the way they behave… Voting in a school, for example, could activate the part of a person’s identity that cares about kids, or norms about taking care of the community. Similarly, voting in a church could activate norms of following church doctrine. Such effects may even occur outside an individual’s awareness – Berger, assistant professor.

The researchers also conducted an experiment that allowed for random assignment of voters to pictures of different voting environments that the researchers thought might influence voting behaviour. Participants were shown 10 images from well-maintained schools (e.g. lockers, classrooms) or churches (e.g. pews, alters), plus five additional filler images of generic buildings. A control group was shown images of generic buildings.

The participants then voted on a number of initiatives including a stem cell funding initiative, an education initiative, and several others. Results showed that participants were less likely to support the stem cell initiative if they were shown church images than if they were shown school images or a generic photo of a building. The subjects also were more likely to support the education initiative if they were shown school images versus church or generic building images. The results further demonstrated that environmental cues present in different polling locations can influence voting outcomes, even when voters are randomly assigned to different environmental cue conditions.

the influence of polling location on voting found in our research would be more than enough to change the outcome of a close election – Wheeler, Stanford Graduate School of Business

While this is clearly not what any democratic country wants – to have people voting on subconscious cues – such results do pose a dilemma: ignore it or work with it. I think working with it would be a better option.

A local party, or campaigner, will know the location of the polling booths. This then gives you an indication as to what to focus on in your campaign in a small specific area. What you put in your focus leaflets, in your letters and what you say on the doorstep could be focused on particular issues that fit the subconscious cues of the polling location e.g. education policy/achievements or supporting families. Small effects such as this are too large to ignore.

Traits of successful politicians: How we subconsiously choose the heathiest candidate

The perceived health of an election candidate can predict how people will vote according to recent research, and voters can form opinions about how healthy a candidate is based solely on the way that person moves. In The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, a clear illustration of how we form subconscious conclusions about other people is shown to be based on how they move.

Psychologists at Bangor University asked people to view short video clips of Barak Obama and John McCain, or Gordon Brown and David Cameron, converted into ‘stick men’ images. These images represented only their movement and with the sound removed. People rated the ‘stick men’ for a range of characteristics including attractiveness, trustworthiness, leadership and physical health. They didn’t know who the ‘stick men’ were, but were asked which one they’d vote for.

Removing appearance and using solely movement, we were still able to ask participants about their perception of the candidates. In real life people would have many more opportunities to see and hear candidates. They’d be taking on other already established influencing factors such as how the candidates sound and dress, as well as considering the policies and parties involved – Dr Robert Ward, Bangor University’s School of Psychology.

In one experiment run before the US presidential elections, 63% of those taking part voted for the unidentified ‘Obama stick-man’ (Obama won 52.7% of the popular votes). In the Brown-Cameron ‘stick man run-off’, there was no clear majority. Both were rated equally healthy by the participants.

The findings showed that the majority voted for the person they’d also rated as most healthy. The link between perceived health and voting pattern was far stronger than between leadership or attractiveness and voting. The results demonstrate that motion can produce systematic vote preferences.

Our results further emphasise that important decisions, like who we vote for, can be influenced by feelings we may be unaware of. Whether a politician appears to be healthy and vital may be completely irrelevant to what they would do in office, yet that appearance may still grab our vote – Dr Robert Ward, Bangor University’s School of Psychology.

To see videos of the stick men see here

Improving local campaigning: How to motivate your volunteers so they are more effective campaigners

The Barnsley by-election result has given the Lib Dems much to think about and it gives some interesting lessons for local parties where there are limited resources. Local politicians campaigning have the unenviable task of trying to get other people to adopt particular goals. Without activists supporting the campaign plan, the campaign will not succeed. However, if you want your volunteers to live up to their full potential, it’s not enough that they do what you tell them to. Again and again, studies show that the greatest motivation and most personal satisfaction comes from those goals that we choose for ourselves.

Self-chosen goals create intrinsic motivation, the desire to do something for its own sake. When people are intrinsically motivated, they enjoy what they are doing more and find it more interesting and are more likely to persuade voters and leave a good impression on potential voters. They persist in the face of difficulty – just look at Dominic Carmen

“There is much to be learned from the people of Barnsley and, despite the insults, it’s valuable experience. Would I do it again? Of course. If you believe passionately in something … then you ignore the personal abuse and fight your corner at all costs.”

Autonomy is particularly critical when it comes to creating and maintaining intrinsic motivation. But in a campaign, goals have to be assigned. So what can local campaign teams do?

It turns out that it isn’t so much actual freedom of choice that matters when it comes to creating intrinsic motivation, but the feeling of choice which gives us some options:

• Explain why the goal they’ve been assigned has value. Too often, people are told what they need to do, without taking the time to explain why it’s important, or how it fits into the bigger picture. No one ever really commits to a goal if they don’t see why it’s desirable in the first place. Don’t assume the why is as obvious to people on your team as it is to you.

• Allow your volunteers to decide how they will reach the goal. The freedom to tailor their approach to their preferences and abilities will also give them heightened sense of control over the situation, which can only benefit performance. If you can’t give them total free reign, try giving them a choice between two options for how to proceed.

• Invite your volunteers to make decisions about peripheral aspects of the task. For those who have to attend meetings where the goals are predetermined, choices such as the topic of the meetings or even what kind of lunch will be ordered, create a feeling of choice. Even when the choices aren’t particularly meaningful or relevant to the goal itself, they can add to a person’s motivation about the task.

An excellent example of this has been Gisela Stuart in the General Election. Sure she would lose, she gave her volunteers tasks and told them they could do it how they wanted and asked them to come up with ideas of their own. With a small volunteer group she managed to buck the swing away from Labour and win the seat. She showed that motivating your small activist base is a an excellent tactic and one the Lib Dems could learn from.

How local parties can improve their local campaigning

The Opinion Leader Research discusses the importance for political parties, community activists and single-issue activists to work together for the benefit of political parties, communities and politics. When they got a group of different activists together they were asked what solutions they could think of which would improve the working relationships. So what can local parties learn from this research to improve their local campaigning?

Non-political party activists are generally critical of the idea of working more closely with local parties but did offer some ways which political parties could connect more with other activist groups.

Solutions: communication and visibility

Activists feel strongly that communication needs to be improved between different groups.

For example, In Somerset, some community and issue-based activists speak of how they do not know people in local parties, and would not know where to find information on local parties. Many feel they have no channels by which to communicate with parties.

For these groups of activists, improved communication is related to the improved visibility of political parties, particularly at a local level. In all the workshops, there is discussion on how the local parties should be more visible. There is discussion around how politicians and parties should have to spend more time on outreach activities, with some in Somerset suggesting the idea of having a ‘second MP’ who focuses all their attention at the constituency level, attending activist meetings and listening to different points of view.

Solutions: forums

In all the workshops, activists suggest that forums are an attractive way of bringing together local parties and other activists. Forums are seen as a way to allow for interaction and the sharing of ideas, and would provide an ongoing channel for communication and feedback.

Importantly, issue-based activists place great emphasis on the need for the forums to be meaningful in terms of their outputs, arguing that local parties need to provide continual feedback. Without this, activists feel that forums could be meaningless talking shops.

Solutions: personal connections

Aside from institutional changes, activists speak of the importance of different activists making connections. More personal connections between activists are seen as leading to greater trust and understanding between different groups, and providing easy channels for communication.

Notes for activists: Increasing voter turnout

A simple technique to increase voter turnout for those living alone:

In one behavioural science experiment they called voters and asked them 3 questions:

• Around what time do you expect you will head to the polls on Tuesday?
• Where do you expect you will be coming from when you head to the polls on Tuesday?
• What do you think you will be doing before you head out to the polls?

The researchers did not care what voters’ answers were to the questions, only whether they had any. He was testing a psychological concept known as “implementation intentions,” which suggests that people are more likely to perform an action if they have already visualized doing it.

The phone calls had little impact on multiple-voter households, but for those living alone, the effect was a 10 percentage points increase in turnout. The reason is hypothesised to be that making plans is a collaborative activity; spouses and roommates already talk through issues like child care as a condition of voting. For those who live alone, rehearsing their Election Day routine with a stranger helped them make a plan.