The latest Ofcom survey shows that 94% of UK households use mobile phones.
Now consider what proportion of UK households have a usable letterbox for delivery of campaign leaflets; i.e. exclude those rural homes without a letterbox, those urban blocks of flats with just a door to push leaflets under, the multiple occupancy houses with a communal hallway but no personal letterboxes and so on.
And then there’s that property on the electoral register which, despite you circling the block four times, taking a peak from the skies through a Google Map satellite view, stalking the postie one morning and even consulting the Land Registry you still cannot find.
Certainly in my experience that all adds up to more than 6%.
That puts in an interesting light the relative effort most campaigns make in getting to people via their mobile phone compared to getting to them via their letterboxes.
* Mark Pack is Party President and is the editor of Liberal Democrat Newswire.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
"The old savage England": D.H. Lawrence visits the Stiperstones
Church Green video
Thinking of standing for election or re-election next year? Helpful questions to consider
Endometriosis and acetylation
Nonconformistradical
Henry
Daniel Walker
David Raw
10 Comments
I doubt that the number of inaccessible letterboxes/homes in Chesterfield even reaches 1% -and there is barely a single one I have not delivered at one time or another so I am speaking from direct experience. So 99% or more are easily accessible with our message.
Whereas collecting the mobile phone numbers of 99% of the voting population would be a mammoth if not entirely impossible task, involve financial costs too and be regarded by many phone users as intrusive and so counter productive.
Personally I can’t stand it when even my mobile phone provider contacts me in this manner. Unlike a land line ringing I assume that if it is my personal mobile ringing then it is someone I know and will want to speak to -so I will normally make the effort to answer even if I am interrupting something else to do so. I’m furious therefore when it is somebody in a call centre trying to ‘establish a personal relationship with me’ ie sell me something I almost certainly didn’t want in the first place. Txt messages are less intrusive but still annoying when unsolicited-and we are back to the huge effort needed to collect anything approaching a 99% (or even on Mark’s worst case scenario) a 94% coverage.
A good point to make, though “mobile phones” covers a lot these days, and delivering information to someone via their piece of electrical equipment is not easy. Could we be looking at “LibDem apps”, if there’s not one already? Or somehow sending bulk text messages to thousands of people on specific service providers?
For everyone who might have an iPhone, there’s another with a bog standard text-and-speak who might not appreciate or notice effort going in to attract the attention of people with more money to spend on fancy equipment.
It is an interesting topic to discuss as we hurtle further into this century, though.
unsolicited e-mails – just about acceptable. Unsolicited phone calls, even to LD party members (me) from head office? No thank you. Especially when they’re asking for money with some weird story about the LD vote increasing. 25% in 2010, 9% now? George Orwell had a point.
Paul: I’m impressed with your knowledge of Chesterfield letterboxes! My guesstimate is based on a fair number of places given Parliamentary by-election experiences too, so would be interesting to see what other people’s experiences are like too and hence have a better idea of what the overall picture is.
Your point about ‘unsolicited’ is key, I think. As with Focus newsletters, if we’ve got interesting news and built up a good reputation, people are more interested in what we have to say – and so more likely to respond well rather than badly to us getting in touch (whether badly means deleting a text message in exasperation or scrunching up a leaflet and sending it straight into the bin).
I think there are many campaigners and topics where communications are welcomed but we don’t make full use of the best opportunities; e.g. campaigners who get many residents interested in turning up to a meeting to hear a controversial planning application but then don’t use text messaging and email to remind people about the details of the meeting in the last couple of days before it.
Gathering in the contact data certainly takes time; the flip side is that using it is then much quicker – e.g. sending out a mass email takes no more time whether it is going to 100 or 300 people, and ends up being much quicker than leafleting, which makes them very effective when used in tandem.
Mark – I think it has to be targeted. I might not mind getting a message from Tories or Labour about their policy on renewable energy after I’d signed an e-petition on the subject, but if I got canvassed by my mobile phone I’d be tempted to send thirty messages back.
Anyone advocating cold calling or texting the general public via their mobile is out of touch. Noone wants to be contacted by strangers, businesses or political parties. That is why legislation was brought out to prevent companies cold calling those who didn’t want to participate.
I agree it can be useful Mark -I just worry about those who grasp for ‘easy’ modern answers to campaigning -you will recall the new candidate at the ALDC session you helped run at Gateshead on ‘fighting Labour’. She asked if street stalls were a good way to contact voters instead of all that’ time consuming door knocking and leaflet delivering’ -no and thrice no being the answer. I recall the new young candidate we had here in May 2011 who really was not keen on door knocking and delivering but thought a My Cllr website would do the job instead.
We use phone knocking up -but unless you manually hit the doors you can only ever reach 40/50% of supporters by phone -and that ratio is worsening because of the increasing use of ex directory numbers and scrapping landlines altogether for mobiles.
How long in your experience does it take to collect mobile phone numbers for say 20% of a Ward? Are there financial costs involved in using such a database once compiled?
Despite all the electronic wonders now at our disposal it remains the fact that the only way to be sure of putting your message in front of everybody (well 94-995 anyway) in your selected area is via hand delivered literature. Ecampaigning is a good add on but only that -not an easy substitute..
I agree with Paul Holmes in his belief that data gathering is extremely important and mobile nos and emails included but is the necessary add-on, to the the real touchstone for actually winning votes and Elections i.e. to canvass and try to catch families on their doorstep or in garden to ask them directly to do a survey or for their support.
I do not understand why Paul Holmes did not hold Chesterfield in 2010-,where I visited two summers past,and local history-as he clearly knows his patch and constituents so well and how to canvass them.
I accept e-mails because I am a member but I’d only accept ANY (mobile or landline) phone calls if I had opted in. Both myself and my partner rarely have the mobile phone switched on as they are for emergencies so even text messages coming in are a distraction when trying to tell her I’m behind a motorway accident but OK.
It’s not rocket science to discover HMOs and individually envelope all the occupants, at least the Cheltenham office seems to manage it. The only failure I noticed is the software does not recognise a married couple of Russian (?) origin because the surname endings are gender specific.
There’s one local LibDem party that uses text messages for ‘knocking up’ on polling day… I.e. when someone says they will vote for the LibDems, the local party offers to remind them to vote on polling day with a text message. The voter can reply with a text when they’ve voted – it stops the party knocking on their door later, and saves the local party time and effort. This could and should be widely replicated.