In May Liberal Democrat Voice carried a piece from Lynne Featherstone about the lessons from May’s elections, in which she laid out five challenges for the party including,
We should ensure that we have at least a modest local internet presence covering every part of the country, helping point the public at more news about the party, how to join, how to get in touch with the local team etc. With the number of existing sources of news and information about the Liberal Democrats, I am sure it can’t be beyond the wit of a clever programmer or two to be able to put together an effective mini-site system that covers our internet black holes at a minimum of cost and effort.
A few days ago the following email went out to local parties:
We have agreed a deal to put in place a local website for every party of the country which does not have its own local Liberal Democrat website.
This deal, with Prater Raines Ltd , will mean that wherever someone lives in the country, they can find the Liberal Democrats easily on the internet and get informed and involved. It will also mean that the party’s campaign buttons and films are much more widely publicised around the internet.
Where a local party does not have a website (e.g. because it is very small and has not been able to afford one or find a suitable volunteer) this deal will ensure that there is a simple, professional looking site. It will contain relevant local contact details, as used currently on www.libdems.org.uk, along with up to date news about the party and its campaigns.The party will also provide an appropriate local web address for each of these sites that can be used in any local activity to help promote it.
The service is based on a cut-down version of Prater Raines’ popular Foci web site service, which is used by many Local Parties, MPs and MEPs across the country. This cut-down version will not allow local administration or updating, but will automatically update with content from the Federal Party web site and other relevant Party sites.
This will include news from any appropriate state, regional or MEP sites that provide stories via a news (RSS) feed. This will be particularly beneficial for the European elections as it means that if MEPs or Euro-candidates have stories going out via their state, regional or MEP sites then the stories will automatically appear on these new local sites across their Euro-constituency.
These sites will be paid for by the party centrally. There is no cost to any local party, and no need for a local webmaster as all content will automatically update from national and relevant regional Liberal Democrat news sources…
The free website service will ensure there is a professional looking website covering every area, with some national / regional news updating regularly and contact details for the local party.
Where at all possible however, we strongly advise local parties to have their own sites with local news and campaigns, extended contact information and more.
If a local party decides to get its own website subsequently, it can either upgrade to a full Foci site, with Prater Raines removing their usual £50 set-up fee for those upgrading from a free site, or if the local party gets a new website via another means we can transfer over the domain name.
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4 Comments
and then they get in touch with the local party through the professional looking website, find out that they membership is nothing like that at all and are then so scared by the lunatics that make up the membership in many of our blackholes that they never come back again.
At least that’s what I assume would happen.
But seriously. As a party we have become obsessed by the internet. Yes it is a useful way for people to pro-actively find out about the Lib Dems in their area, but compared to putting a leaflet through a letterbox it doesn’t get us many more votes. Only the really keen people will go to a website to find out about the party.
Now though we want every local party to have one, every councillor, every candidate and so on… We’ve spent years trying to improve the quality of our leaflets by either training people better or taking the writing of them out of the hands of idiots, for us then to let those same nutters instead write what they want on the internet.
I first joined the Party in 1973. It took me two months to track down someone who was prepared to take my money off me. At least this scheme will prevent the same thing happening nowadays.
I agree with Nigel—for LPs with no one with the relevent skills who can’t afford the charges PRAI have for a full Foci site this is a very good plan. Of course, it does rely on the central info being up-to-date, and some LPs can’t even manage that.
When I moved to my current area getting in touch with the LP was very difficult (the membership secretary had left the party and the federal site wasn’t updated), but we’re now overhauling all our local sites with a fairly coherent strategy.
Anon—you have a point about over-obsession with the net, and of course on our websites this can look much more than it is, but I personally believe that the age of leaflets as the most effective campaigning tool is coming to an end—when I was younger getting a leaflet from anything was unusual (I was born the year after Nigel joined the party), these days I get a pizza delivery menu every couple days.
Leaflets hit the bin for most people, yes, they work, but for how long?
On the other hand, when a major news story happens, the BBC news website gets a massive spike in traffic—that recent earthquake that put the previous earthquake story up to ‘most read’ almost immediately is a case in point.
We need to work on building a search presence so that people looking for local news find us—because increasingly the web is where people are going.
That means resources, training, and a lot of support for teaching people how to ‘write for the web’. And yes, making sure that the main LP news sites have a coherent message without ranting lunacy is essential. OTOH, encouraging as many of our Cllrs and MPs to have a site of their own and learn to think about what they’re saying shouldn’t be a bad thing.
And the joy of search is that only the good stuff gets top results, most of the time, links are king after all.
This is good news overall I think.
Anonymous: not surprisingly, I don’t quite agree 🙂 But I do very much agree that writing content for websites and emails should be taken just as seriously as writing content for leaflets and letters.
Generally in my experience it is, and the quality of the online and offline content is pretty similar in a local party, though not always as good as we’d wish it to be.