In the run up to the election, I sent numerous emails to activists in Hornsey and Wood Green, congratulating them for hitting ‘green’ in all our HQ-monitored key performance indicators (KPIs).
We were model pupils. Bar membership, I think we hit green every month, on every indicator.
And it’s no wonder. We worked so hard – and the campaign was the biggest that Hornsey had ever seen: in terms of numbers of activists on the ground, number of doors knocked on, and pieces of literature produced and delivered.
We were more organised and more targeted in our approach than ever before. We couldn’t have worked harder.
In fact, the one thing that didn’t hit ‘green’ was the only thing that really mattered – the result. That was a big fat (-10,000) red.
This pattern was true of many other seats – and as a local campaign manager, I’ve put a lot of thought into why this happened.
Some may say (and have said!) – for Hornsey and other similar seats – that the writing was on the wall from the moment the coalition agreement was signed; that no amount of work could have lead to victory. Possibly true.
But there is one logical conclusion we can draw from the contrasting ‘green’ KPIs and ‘red’ result, without having to get into that debate: That just monitoring performance is not – on its own – enough to indicate whether a winning campaign is being run. And that KPIs alone don’t give us an insight on whether a change of strategy, new messaging etc is needed.
So the question is – what else do we need? At least part of the answer, I believe, is that we need to monitor the effectiveness of our campaigns as well as our performance. It’s something that just isn’t done well at the moment – if at all.
For instance Hundreds of thousands of doorstep conversations were had in the run up to the election (yay – great performance), but do we have any idea how many of the conversations changed minds, or which were the most effective?
In Hornsey alone, over fifty different pieces of literature went out in the last few month (yay – great performance), but does anyone know which pieces made voters more or less likely to vote for us?
The answer to both is ‘not really.’ But had we (in Haringey or HQ) better monitored the effectiveness of our plans from the start – the intelligence we gathered could have refined our approach as we went on – and we could have reacted rather than ploughing on with the same messages.
For instance, locally, while we couldn’t have added anything extra into the campaign or worked any harder – we perhaps could have axed national messages or pieces of local literature that weren’t cutting through, and replaced them with others that were, in order to improve our chances.
If you want an example of this being done well in practice – look at how the Tories reacted to the Labour/SNP interplay, and adapted their messaging to target audiences accordingly.
For the Lib Dems – learning this lesson and getting into the habit of measuring effectiveness properly in the future will make our campaigns more efficient and help us fight smartly. It will help make sure our activists’ time is spent on making a real impact and changing people’s minds – not on cumbersome tasks that won’t make a difference to the overall result.
Here’s the snag – monitoring effectiveness is much more difficult than monitoring performance. Keeping a numerical tally of how many bits of paper go through the doors is easier than monitoring and reacting to behaviour change among our multiple target audiences.
For instance, monitoring effectiveness involves focus groups, gathering detailed resident feedback, surveys, a whole lot of data analysis, and grouping together of anecdotal evidence from activists. It involves testing different messages on the same polling district or different target pools (for instance) and comparing results. (Other ideas on how to do this, incidentally, are more than welcome!)
It takes effort, but if we don’t do it, we risk blindly continuing with campaign techniques we’ve ‘always done’ – without any idea of whether they’re having an impact and helping the fight back.
We risk another set of elections where people turn to each other after and say: ‘oh, but we ran such a good campaign’ in the face of further devastating defeat.
I don’t want this to happen again in Haringey, or anywhere else.
To avoid it, I think we need to fight smartly as well as working hard, pounding the pavements. And monitoring effectiveness, testing messaging/techniques and adapting plans – rather than just ticking monthly KPI boxes – is key to this.
* Jenni Hollis is Haringey Liberal Democrat Campaign Chair, former Office and Campaign Manager for Lynne Featherstone. Now working in as a Campaigns Consultant for Verbalisation, and blogging and commentating at www.JenniHollis.org.uk
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Lord Bonkers: "Something less terrible than the truth"
Two new Makerfield by-election polls gives Burnham 5 and 12 point leads
Reform under water
David Raw
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53 Comments
I think the Tsunami that swept away so many Lib Dem MPs would have overwhelmed any system you could have chosen to try and keep track. In this context it was more of a Black Swan event (albeit one that was predictable and indeed predicted but the scale was generally not).
At least you are probably now at the nadir and your old system may well still be fit for purpose now the very unusual and specific circumstances of the coalition are past. Although there will likely be some residual blow-back for years to come.
It must be really nice to have all that resource to play management games with. Personally I (used to be) active in politics because I believed in a number of things that I thought the LDs also, in general, believed in. I suspect that all the KPIs in the world won’t get someone elected if the message is “we don’t believe in very much, actually, but we’ll moderate whichever of the other two parties get in if the numbers are right”. It’s not inspiring, especially after 5 years of hearing yet another Tory nonsense on the morning news. I imagine that most voters voted for the party they wanted to be in power, and saw the LDs as an irrelevance, or as pseudo tories. It’ll be a long road back, assuming that the LDs collectively believe in something that a significant fraction of the voters want.
Labour seem to be suffering from the same problem. Why do we need 3 neo-liberal parties? To give the voters the illusion of choice?
Great post Jenni.
I think this is an important contribution to the debate about where we go from now.
You’re right that Haringey couldn’t have run a better campaign – I helped out there and I’ve never seen such a hive of activity. I was always staggered by how much was getting done.
That being said – I think there’s also a little to be said about the questions we were asking, and the quality of the interactions. Haringey is one of my favourite places to campaign because the residents are so lovely, and everyone was fond of Lynne on the doorsteps.
I’m assuming for us to have finished so far behind that a large number of our Probs went Labour, and probably all of our Soft Labour – what were we not asking them in order to anticipate this?
What our MPs were voting for in the 5 years before the election was massively more significant than the campaign itself. Perhaps we could have had some KPIs that cover the public’s response to our parliamentary performance.
Hi Jenni
I think your post is admirable and it sounds like you fought a perfect text book campaign
with all the boxes ticked unfortunately so did Labour in your constituency and the Tories elsewhere in England
who realised if they took out enough of our seats they would win and they did. Good luck next time.
I think this is good, but it fails to mention the manifesto. After I saw the manifesto I went from telling my friends and family to vote Lib Dem to just keeping it to myself or letting people make their own minds up.
There were a lot of ring-fenced spending departments and it seemed the books were going to be balanced on the back of defence and businesses, mainly through more regulation. The messaging was “centre-ground”, but the manifesto was only about as pro business as Labour’s.
Alistair – We did have KPIs that covered the public’s response to our parliamentary performance, they were called election results. They came out each May and showed what the disaster that was happening. However the leadership didn’t like the results and spent a fortune on polls etc. that gave a different view of things. Ultimately we were monitoring the performance of the infantry and ignoring the performance of the generals.
The central message that was being put out by the party was all wrong. I spent so much time here during the period of the Coalition government explaining why. Note, I always accepted and defended the formation of the Coalition, and accepted that what we go out of it was about what could be expected given the situation. But the top insisted we promoted it as super-duper wonderful and exaggerated our influence in it, which turned off most of our former voters because it made us look like dyed-in-the-wool Tories.
It doesn’t matter how many leaflets you deliver and doors you knock on if the message you are putting out is one which people who used to be inclined to vote for us don’t like.
@Alistair “Perhaps we could have had some KPIs that cover the public’s response to our parliamentary performance.”
There were lots of KPIs from 5 years of opinion polls and elections. All told the same story and the party ignored it.
In the run up to the election, even the party’s own private polling (which would address some of the measurements that Jenni is suggesting here) was flawed and ignored where it gave answers the party did not want to hear.
Hi Jenni,
Thanks for this. One lesson for me in Portsmouth is that whilst I felt capacity enabled us to get out key messages, the prioritisation of those messages, particularly of rebuttle, could have been given more consideration.
I think new types of data gathering need to come into effect not only to monitor the direction of travel but why this is occurring and it’s relevance for future elections. I suspect a lot of buy-in for anti-SNP messages will soon fade, as will that support for welfare cuts as we reach a net surplus – the thing about the data we record is that rarely maps why voters make decisions – just the decision themselves.
Campaigners and candidates will anecdotally tell stories of why past supporters plumped for their opponents (and certainly, in my view, it’s a lot more complicated than ‘tuition fees’) but this data is rarely recorded in any meaningful way.
Certainly longer conversations with switch voters will be important – how, if and where this should occur is a matter of debate, but certainly one we should be having.
This article reminds us of the phenomenal work rate of inner-city activists in London. I know from my old ward in Peckham/Walworth that the churn in the electorate is a nightmare to keep up with at the best of times.
But this article is nearly all about the machinery not the message and I am afraid the message we sent to the inner-city, particularly on welfare, was a message that stank. Both the new MPs for Bermondsey and Hornsey have been crowing that the bedroom tax alone was enough to win them their seats.
Jenni says, ‘from the moment the coalition agreement was signed; that no amount of work could have lead to victory. Possibly true.’ Sorry, Jenni – absolutely true. The sooner the party wakes up to that reality the better. No amount of KPI’s can alter the fact that Hornsey was lost by over 11,000 votes.
The mass of the general public – especially those on the progressive side of the spectrum – had formed a view that tarred the Liberal Democrats with the right wing Tory brush.
It would be more profitable to look at the reality of public perceptions of the party in both Scotland and England. The last time we were really in tune with the progressive mood was when Charles Kennedy spoke up on Iraq. The SNP deluge – which sadly swept over even Charles – was because it tuned in with the perception of an unequal Society where the rich got richer and the poor get poorer and where austerity was perceived as a con trick to achieve just that. Making claims – as some of our leaders did – that the British economy was in the same danger as Greece just don’t wash.
What we need under our new leadership is an honest look at policy and the needs of society now. There’s plenty of evidence about. A new sharp truly radical critique of modern society will have more resonance with the ‘liberal’ sections of society than KPI’s.
Sorry, Jenni, no wish to undermine what seems to have been a truly heroic effort on your part – but you can put lipstick on a pig and it’s still a pig – and if it quacks, swims and has webbed feet it’s more likely to be a duck than a swan.
A rebirth of truly radical Liberalism is needed given the current disarray of the Labour Party and the uninspiring bunch contesting their leadership. A revival then might be quicker than some folk think.
On messaging, manifesto etc – the point I wanted to make is that, had we be monitoring the effectiveness of our campaigning rather than just the performance, we would have realised earlier how well or badly certain messages were being received, and adapted accordingly. It may not have saved some seats, but it would have helped narrow the margins and it would have helped campaign mgrs and activists focus on the activities that would really help.
The two measurements are complimentary. You need a high level of performance to get a message out, but you need effectiveness measurements to determine whether the message needs changing! And having that analysis will help make future campaigns (at HQ and pavement level) more efficient, and assist with the fightback.
Frankly by December 2010 – thanks to general polling and especially to Lord Ashcroft’s mega poll that summer, it was obvious we were not going to win any plain vanilla Labour facing seats.
We adopted a very strange form of Coalition politics – most suited to the larger party and suicidal to the smaller party. Anyone with experience of politics in balanced political institutions eg 150 local councils over the last 40 years, the Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament – armed with ALDC’s ‘Life in the balance’ manual or having experienced an ALDC workshop on the subject knows that the system has to be openly ‘transactional’.
It obviously suited Cameron (as Ryan Cortzee reveals in his useful analysis of what went wrong) and Clegg who needed to get through policies that he had little confidence in his Party backing if the mechanics were more open.
So leaving that aside and looking at campaign techniques being used.
They are clearly light years behind the messaging and campaigning techniques used by the Tories.
So, Jenni, you may have hit your green traffic lights, but you were on the wrong road or going in totally the wrong direction through those lights.
The template for a successful Parliamentary election really hasn’t change since the Eighties. Sure it was gradually perfected by people like Peter Chegwyn and then refined and codified by Chris Rennard. But the mistake was this codification. We became as specialised as a dinosaur. Innovation was frowned upon – innovation would have given you a red light.
If anything, I think the way we used the technological developments since the 80s compounded the inherent weakness in our approach to campaigning. Our printed stuff has been woeful for years.
But let’s face it – the dozen best and most innovative campaigners (able to innovate because they understood what campaigning is for in the hands of Liberals) have been kept out of any influence because they are challenging people by nature.
Our campaigning has been bureaucratic, formulaic, and frankly ‘illiberal’ as it was based on deception of electors rather than in service to them to help them take and use their own power.
Did you never question what you were being asked to do … ever?
Did you never gaze across at organisations like 38 degrees and say ‘why aren’t we campaigning like that?’
I’m sure there’s a term for it, which I can’t remember right now, but I think it showed the problem we’ve had for a few years where there was a lot of obsession with local parties having to deliver their KPIs because that was something that could be measured, and thus managed but it led to ignoring all the things that couldn’t be. The problem was that it helped to generate a ‘shut up and deliver leaflets/knock on doors’ atmosphere, with everything centred around hitting the targets and lots of Stakhanovite urging to match other constituencies. That meant the fundamental problems with the campaign never really got addressed, because complaints were often met with ‘you’re not doing enough’ or ‘do even more of what you’re already doing and that’ll sort it’. Despite all the evidence from post-2010 elections showing that ‘where we work we win’ wasn’t true any more (if it ever was), it was still treated as if it was.
David Raw – not sure if you intend it, but your comment wasn’t really helpful here. Discussions about where we are politically are useful, and helpful, but this was not that thread. We are primarily discussing an evidence-based approach to campaigning and how we get there.
I think this argument is really interesting. Obviously our role in the coalition made this election difficult but to use that as an excuse to not consider our campaigning is foolish. After every election, whether you win or lose, whether the campaign was to blame/credit or not, you should reflect on what you did well and what you did badly.
In terms of our weaknesses I wonder if the Lib Dems have focused too much on quantity of interactions and and not enough on quality. I read this recently (http://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2015/06/the-computers-that-crashed-and-the-campaign-that-didnt-the-story-of-the-tory-stealth-operation-that-outwitted-labour.html), and whilst most of it was things we already do the section on “The Survey” jumped out at me as something we don’t. Our message should be more targeted so we are picking up on the issues important to each individual voter.
I’m not sure it was inevitable when we went into coalition that we would suffer, but it was going to be difficult. It was a great opportunity because it gave us and Nick the chance to show what the Lib Dems could do in coalition. We had the chance to deliver what people expected of us and hold the excesses of the Conservatives back.
Of course one of the problems was that the coalition agreement was weak on what we wanted and needed, while it was strong on what the Conservatives wanted. Also it involved us giving early in the five years in the hope that the Conservatives would give later. Finally, and very few of us realised this at the time of the vote at conference, it included a total giveaway on tuition fees which Nick apparently had never liked. As a result the seeds of destruction were sown. We were outmanoeuvred in the negotiations, we gave early and often and we (i.e. Nick) looked and sounded like a Conservative. Nick claimed he stopped a lot of bad stuff, but he didn’t realise how much more he needed to stop.
Perhaps by the time we went into coalition it was inevitable we were doomed, but it didn’t have to be so.
Kevin McNamara – Sorry, but I’m afraid you’ve made my point. I’m sure it’s possible to get KPI’s for selling fridges to Eskimos.
I always find it interesting how so many people love the detail here, while Bill puts his finger on the big point. Putting it simply the problem with evidence based decisions is that the evidence collected and used is all too often the wrong evidence; but even worse for those who seek it, the evidence that is worth having is the most difficult and the most expensive to obtain and often can’t be obtained until it is too late. So it comes down to judgement. Information and evidence should aid judgement, but can never replace it.
That is what great campaigns are based on.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the side constituency…
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/16/how-rebuild-labour-political-party-from-ground-up
It doesn’t matter how you sell a product….If the public don’t like it, they won’t buy it….If five years of the public telling us we were ‘selling’ the wrong product didn’t get through???
Before knocking on doors; look at the product
As has always been the case with KPIs, if the KPIs are looking good but the result isn’t then you’re not measuring the correct KPIs, in fact you’re not measuring KPIs. And as others have already pointed out, there are plenty of KPIs that have been red over the last few years ; opinion polling rates, local election results and Euro election results for example.
I too spent most of the election in Haringey and it was indeed a well-organised campaign.
So no doubt were many other campaigns, but the fundamental problem – as one now ex-MP put it to me – was that the party was trying to use organisational means to solve a political problem.
Since political problems require political solutions even the best organisation could do no more than reduce the level of defeat.
The political problems are now well-known – the loss of trust over tuition fees and the systematic offending of each group that comprised – insofar as we had one – the Lib Dem core vote: students, youngish professional people, low income voters in rural areas among them.
Since the party leadership was unable to fix, the political problems, those on the organisational side faced an impossible task no matter how well they did.
Interesting comments on judgements and whether we questioned what we were doing at the time. The answer is yes – and in my role I introduced new pieces / parts of the campaign on top of the traditional ones (including squeeze letters form the chair of the local Tory party, switch letters from an FGM survivor encouraging people to back Lynne as a champion of women’s rights, a seat specific ‘unity’ campaign, social media advertising, campaign videos and more.)
By the end we’d virtually ditched SEFS and focussed on Lynne as a progressive choice bc of equal marriage, FGM etc – which was the only thing resonating on the doorstep.
So we very much tried to challenge the political problem (via a well organised campaign).
But without effectiveness measurements from the start, some of those judgements came too late on, and we had no idea which ones were really cutting through and making a difference. It also made it more difficult to break from the traditional models because I didn’t have hard evidence to present to HQ to justify my approach.
That’s why I’d like to see more of them (effectiveness measurements) in the future!
David Raw – if I proved the point you’re alleging, you either didn’t read my comment or Jenni’s article (or both). I’m critical of KPIs being the sole basis of measuring the efficacy of a campaign, as there is obviously another dimension. If it was hard work alone, we’d have won everywhere we targeted.
I’ll try again though – my point was that your assertions about our ideological direction *have nothing* to do with developing an evidence-based campaigning approach that is responsive to what is happening on the ground. If that was what we were hearing and recording, and using to change our techniques, that’s fine but *we were not doing that* and we need to figure out how we better develop responsive campaigns.
Jenni – thanks for your open responses. Have you ever heard of ‘integrated campaigning’? as the term has been used by Liberals and then Liberal Democrats?
I need to elaborate: Jenni Hollis is right that it is effectiveness what matters and the effectiveness of messaging needs constant evaluation, but the way the manifesto, along with the campaign, seemed to prioritise teachers and health workers above police officers and defence workers who risk their lives for the country was wrong. They should be treated broadly equally.
The worrying thing is: I don’t see this changing. Despair. I’m beginning to think Farron is more skilled than Lamb, but people need to tell him to stop sounding so relaxed about mass immigration. I can’t see any case for supporting mass immigration. The left wing solution is to reduce it by building up the economies and security of poorer countries, but to just sound relaxed about the status quo is a bit of a logic failure and will drive working class voters to Labour and UKIP.
” I sent numerous emails to activists in Hornsey and Wood Green, congratulating them for hitting ‘green’ in all our HQ-monitored key performance indicators (KPIs).”
To set such KPIs it would perhaps have helped if those involved had a genuine idea of the massive problems of their ‘product’ which far-outweighed any deficiencies in activity levels.
Tony – completely agree! And MoE analysis could have provided that insight. Just incase there’s been any misunderstanding – I sent that email in my role as local campaign chair. I was (and am) a local activist/volunteer – not a HQ staff member who set the KPIs.
Imo, getting the right messages and monitoring their effectiveness is going to be even more important in London in 2016. We can do worse than looking here: http://thinkingliberal.co.uk/?p=1146
@Jenni Hollis:
“On messaging, manifesto etc – the point I wanted to make is that, had we be monitoring the effectiveness of our campaigning rather than just the performance, we would have realised earlier how well or badly certain messages were being received, and adapted accordingly.”
I am really genuinely intrigued at theidea that a better speedometer might have assisted us to take the out of control vehicle on the wrong road and somehow have headed more appropritely towards our destination.
Clearly, with limited resources, as we went into the final weeks of the GE campaign, we might not really have been getting too much systematic feedback as to how we were doing. If our central Party was receiving such feedback, do we really genuinely feel that we would have received this information in a useful and/or timely manner?
With regard to manifesto and messaging, frankly the decisions of most of the electorate were pretty much made up in 2010-2011. and re-inforced in the subsequent four years. Any twiddling in the last six weeks was hardly going to turn around the oil tanker in the creek into which it had been diverted at full speed by the wheelhouse crew.
A great difficulty, I am afraid, is that where the population were largely well-disposed towards our individual local MPs they were perhaps too embarrassed/polite to tell us “actually we think your guy/gal is lovely/great but we think you national Party is irrelevent/useless so not this time, I’m afraid”. 🙁
@Kevin McNamara
“.Discussions about where we are politically are useful, and helpful, but this was not that thread. We are primarily discussing an evidence-based approach to campaigning and how we get there.”
A discussion about an evidence-based approach would imply a Party which is interested in an evidence-based approach. What we have heard regarding the central polling operation and how it arrived at its conclusions about potential winnability of dozens of Lib Dem seats some months before the ‘hot’ campaign proper started up would suggest that this is far from being a ‘given’.
David Evans
I’m not sure it was inevitable when we went into coalition that we would suffer, but it was going to be difficult.
It was always going to be difficult. If you look at similar situations elsewhere, a smallish party whose supporters are a little uncertain as to what it is really about, and which is joining in a coalition for the first time, the smallish party is almost always severely damaged by it.
Yet prior to the coalition it was always portrayed as if when a hung parliament happened we would almost have won the election and get whatever we wanted. It just doesn’t work like that. We should have made that clear. We did not. Instead there seemed to be a genuine belief at the top of the party that people would come flocking to us once we were in coalition, so we had all that stuff boasting about being “a party in government” which most people interpreted as “they’re just another bunch of politicians who only really care about jobs for themselves”. To make it worse, we fought the 2010 election on a “no broken promises” line, but a coalition is bound to result in compromises and they can easily be painted as “broken promises”. To make it more worse, at the top of the party it was put across that we were panting to remain in coalition after the 2015 general election, as if that’s all we wanted. To make it worse still, at a time when the message we needed to get across was that a small party of about 50 MPs cannot get that much out of a coalition with a big party of about 300 MPs so even if it didn’t look much we’d done well, in the 2015 general election we (or the people at the top) joined in the scare message about the damage that could be caused by another party of about 50 MPs holding the balance and so running the show.
And that’s just a start at listing all the obvious mistakes made.
Indeed Matthew, the list of errors made by the party in government is clear for all to see. The one problem I have is when people still say (and I include both leadership candidates in this) that history will look more kindly on Nick and the Lib Dems. This really reinforces the ‘Noble Sacrifice Variant” of the ‘Nick was Right’ gambit used by so many of the true believers.
Nick almost sacrificed the whole of Liberal Democracy for five years in power, during which, the main thing he achieved was to detoxify the Conservative party and toxify Liberal Democracy possibly for decades to come. We have a huge mountain to climb, but first we have to get out of the pit Nick has dug for us all.
David Evans
I disagree with only one part of your (and Matthew’s) analysis: the Tory party remains as toxic as ever.
Malcolm Todd. Maybe so but in 2010 the Tories could not win a majority in what we’re very favourable circumstances. After five years of Coalition, people thought ‘ oh well the Tories were not that bad’ and have voted for them. As for the Lib Dems everyone thought ‘ broke their promises’ but apart from that, they were largely ignored. So the Lib Dems made the Tories electable and destroyed their own party.
Malcolm Todd 24th Jun ’15 – 4:21pm ………David Evans, I disagree with only one part of your (and Matthew’s) analysis: the Tory party remains as toxic as ever……………..
But it’s a toxin the public bought….
BTW…I’d like to see a few threads here commenting on the Tories post election; I’ve seen more criticism here of the ‘Greens’ than of Tory statements. Pre-election LDV ran umpteen threads on Labour’s policies….
Cameron, May, Osborne and Gove have lost no time in ‘setting out their stall’; our current target should be clear….
Have a look at my usual blog – plenty of posts about the new Conservative Government. For instance: http://www.jennihollis.org.uk/human_rights_act_a_starting_point
Also – it would be great to hear other ideas about how we measure and assess the effects of our messaging/campaigning!
Jenni – thanks for this heartfelt tale of disaster.
Painting-by-numbers, as those of a certain age will remember, was a pre-Internet pastime for 8 year olds, possibly fun but certainly not art. Politics-by-numbers – aka KPIs – is similar but probably less fun and certainly not grown-up politics.
That we, as a party, allowed such an inept bunch to take over Lib Dem Towers and remain there despite the very clear and repeated evidence of impending disaster not to mention some extraordinarily illiberal policies means that – although it pains me to say so – we deserved to loose big.
I am still trying to understand why the MPs did not assert themselves in time to prevent disaster. Do the party’s formal structures make this effectively impossible or are they clueless co-authors of their own misfortune?
Jenni, I am sorry if you think this is pestering, but do you know what Liberal Democrats mean by integrated campaigning and the dual approach?
Sadly we didn’t do any in the 2010-15 Parliament. Which was th greatest opportunity we ever had of doing so. But Liberals and then Liberal Democrats who have been successful – and that would include Lynne – were good at integrated campaigning and using the dual approach – when campaigning outside and inside institutions such as Haringey Council.
But then when we had the opportunity of getting some campaign wins from a dual approach, outside and inside, the institution of central government itself we ignored all the best practice built up over 55 years – that is actually since the Liberals in Liverpool campaigned to stop the extension of the M62 smashing through and dividing neighbourhoods on its proposed way into the heart of the City – won 40 seats in the resulting council election and used the influence on power (they too didn’t get a majority ) to stop the road and safeguard those neighbourhoods from fracture.
The best ‘measure’ of the effectiveness of a campaign – in politics – as opposed to commercial practice – is the number of people it succeeds in involving – and of course the extent and quality of that involvement.
The best way to proceed, then, is to engage in a number of campaigns and to see which gain the most traction in terms of participation gained and power co-ordinated, that is in commitment produced from activists both in the party and in the community affected by the campaign.
Politics is not about marketing. It is about creating and leading a movement. They are very different.
If anything the Party was cursed in recent years from a marketing approach to political campaigning. You have to ‘feel’ support, ‘sense’ movement, concentrate resources where you detect change in your direction.
The Tories did this when their ‘dead cat trick’ administered by Fallon began to shift things. They then had the skill to ‘feel this’, to read the feedback accurately and quickly’, to refine the ‘line’ and to press with Napoleonic concentration on the weakness their experience and skill detected.
It was really a macro example of the ability a small number of Liberal Democrats also have.
@Ruth Bright
You mentioned you were in your old ward of Walworth; I’m also a Walworthian but of the Labour disposition. Were you the person I ran into with Simon Hughes outside the school?
As I pointed out then, I should be a natural liberal democrat voter; I’m on the centrist side of the Labour Party. Many people found Simon’s position on marriage equality quite offensive; if you are going to be a liberal in coalition with conservatives, you at least need to hold onto the social liberal side of things.
The fact that the only party signs visible in the windows of the houses in Sutherland Square should have told the LDs that if you can’t even hold onto the votes of the most affluent Walworthians, then something is very wrong.
Many of us found the attitude of Liberal Democrats dismissing our concerns about coalition government to be quite arrogant. And areas where the LDs really should have held the government back, like legal aid, the stripping away of employment rights etc, they did not. The worst part is that the Lib Dems didn’t even say “These are policies we don’t agere with but must accept as a part of coalition”; they actively defended all government policies as being desirable.
Finally, the Liberal Democrats’ swallowing of the false narrative that Labour overspending caused the recession meant that it lost the goodwill of many moderate centre leftists, even those inclined to some degree of fiscal consolidation.
WildColonialBoy – it sounds like you were in Newington. I was in Faraday. Sorry to be dull but I would not disagree with any of the points you make.
I like the idea of trying to monitor effectiveness of leaflets etc. I had a few instances in target seats in May where anecdotal evidence suggested that frequency of leaflets/door-knocks put some voters off us. That evidence is *only* ancedotal, but something to tell us what actually worked would be brilliant.
Thanks for a great post Jenni. I was one of the activists delivering leaflets for Lynne. I agree with you entirely on having to have some way of measuring which are working. I thought those involving third party endorsements (ex-Tory, FGM survivor) most likely to be effective but who knows? How do you see us winning the seat back? Haringey Council are the gift that keeps on giving but without something like Iraq I see Labour being hard to shift…..
Mark Argent, I am not sure you understand the real purpose of matching and exceeding ‘leaflet’ drops DURING an election. But then why should you. Frankly, their purpose is NOT to be read. It is as much about preventing people from reading your opponent’s material. In held and target seats, Communicating for conversion is done before the election. And of course communicating ‘hunger’.
Why has a generation of Lib Dems come into existence who know nothing about campaigning!
Answer because a culture developed of leaving this to ??? … to the central campaign department??? Of taking templates and using them unthoughtfully? Of doing things because funding comes with strings attached.
Oh dear.
Good post, Jenni. In management speak, this is called “results based management” – it’s where you measure the outcome snd impact NOT the input and activity (I used to work in strategic planning). Contrary to popular believe, it’s not that hard to develop indicators to measure outcomes and impact. The key is building in the responsiveness to learn and change behaviour. But where there’s a will (and I’m still not sure there is in some quarters), there’s a way…
I think we’ve managed to forget some political skills. We rely on polls, which are very informative (though this time most of the one-seat polls that mattered seem to have been completely wrong) but maybe we’ve lost the old campaigner’s FEEL for how a campaign is going, based on smiles and funny looks as much as on Connect. We had supposedly state-of-the art national systems to back up local campaigns, but it seems resources were being poured into seats where victory was a distant dream even if we finished with 30 plus MPs right through the day. In Colchester where I was doing my bit for our local strategic seat and knocking up in early evening, our team encountered many people on our supporter lists who said they’d voted but not for us. Even before that, it was clear that a seat with a very well-established local MP, an effective team and a sizeable majority was in serious doubt. Was such information from around the country effectively learnt from or did we lose our hard heads and refuse to see the writing on the wall? In St Albans, visiting in the last week, I found the candidate certain that the Tory vote was hardening and increasing as we approached polling day.
In many places, we put out masses of literature. I’ve heard from others that some of the national stuff was of little value, but there’s also an issue about the amount of leafleting when some leafleters could have been sent canvassing or persuaded harder to phone canvass. The evidence is that in many places the Tories beat us on both forms.
Finally, I am just amazed Eddie found so many people who’d read the manifesto. I’m not amazed that he thinks something that roughly took us back to the party’s positioning under Ashdown and Kennedy (terrible years of humiliation, weren’t they?) was the problem rather than the coalition or the dishonoured pledge or the well-meant but disastrously misconceived leadership.
I think that leaving the analysis until during the campaign is probably a bit too late. I haven’t canvassed for about 8 years but when you have canvassed getting a really positive response you can easily tell when the tide runs against you. Former supporters may say they will vote for you but whereas before they were smiling and nodding and holding the door open as they said goodbye, now they say “oh yes” and can’t get rid of you fast enough. I’ve been through two or three of that sort of response and although I couldn’t canvass in this election I bet there was that sort of response on the doorstep .
There are always people who don’t want so many leaflets but it doesn’t seem to matter when you’re winning.
What I don’t understand is why our leaders didn’t believe the actual voting through all the post 2010 elections. I can understand maybe the first local elections but not the hammering in the Euros. I’m so sorry you worked so hard Jenni and lost but the ALDC advice “Where you work you win” isn’t quite true. For the most part we don’t win without working hard, but as you have realised working hard doesn’t mean you always win.
I think you are quite right in your analysis but I don’t think any amount of negative feedback could have taken the blinkers off the eyes of our leadership and unfortunately some are still wearing them.
It’s a bit late on the thread, so I don’t know if anyone will read this, but there’s an interesting post by Chris Dillow today on managerialism vs innovation http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2015/06/managerialism-vs-innovation.html He’s looking at business, but it made me wonder about what’s happened with our campaigning. Have we all been too focused on delivering the KPIs to think about new ways of doing things? When HQ is telling people that they have to meet the targets to keep themselves in the game, what motivation is there for local teams to try new things if it might mean falling behind on their targets? The point Dillow makes is that managerialism has been good at making small improvements to productivity through efficiencies, but that’s crowded out the space for genuine innovation in how we do things.
I was struck by something Tim Farron said in a meeting I was at the other day – ‘all my best campaigning ideas have come from other people’ – when talking about how Romsey (I believe) developed the blue letter. Maybe a priority for the new leadership should be to relax or even get rid of campaign targets in order to encourage people to spend more time trying new things, and praising them for it even if they don’t work.
I was at Hornsey & Wood Green and was impressed by the effort and planning put into the campaign.
What Jenni is saying is highly relevant to any campaign. How do you know how the effective the campaign is – what is working and what is not? How do you react to unexpected attacks from opponents? How easy is it to change the campaign during it? What is the balance between local and national campaigns and issues?
As I see it, modifying a campaign during its run depends on those seeking the change being able to convince those directing and doing the campaigning and also how flexible the resources employed in the campaign are. I think Jenni’s campaign setup had the potential to fulfill those aims. Whether Lynne could then have won is a different question.
Nick Barlow – the ‘bluey’ was not developed in the Romsey by-e;ection – perhaps the answer is in the name?
To my mind the only way to guarantee votes is to secure members.
Members will either vote for you, or tell you why they aren’t. Everything else is guess work.
So we do have to rethink our campaigning strategies, and go back to being community activists and organisers.