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It’s a rather odd feeling to be writing up one of these meeting round-ups when the media is reporting (inaccurately) on the things you’ve been discussing! Still, here we are. FPDC met on 24^th July and started by getting through the business we had deferred from our last meeting.

We noted some excellent new developments from the Diversity team in HQ with how they’re monitoring statistics and doing more to solicit ideas and feedback. Small changes, but the impact may be huge. We also approved a paper from Adrian Hyyrylainen-Trett, the Chair of the Diversity Subcommittee, to set some new objectives for his committee. 

We moved on to talk about an impact of GDPR on our membership recruitment procedures. The GDPR and Compliance teams in HQ, together with the Membership team and Pastoral Care Officer drew up a new process that will comply with GDPR. Essentially, it says that those under 18 must supply their date of birth, and those under 13 must provide the consent of a parent or guardian before they can join. This is because GDPR insists that under 13’s cannot give consent (which I find pretty awful, but we still have to comply). We also agreed to try to do more to promote the availability of Young Liberals membership to all those new members who did not say they were under 18 but may still be eligible by being under 26. (If you want to know more about this new joining process, please do ask me in the questions section below.)

We finished this first part of the meeting by noting that the FPDC Boost guide on member engagement had been pulled back from publication due to GDPR guidance changes, and to incorporate the outstanding work of a volunteer who has been looking at membership data management in local parties. The amendments should be completed and the guide finally published later in August.

Then we moved on to the continued discussion on the proposed supporters scheme. We began by honouring the committee’s request to be briefed on the messaging work led by FCEC (the Federal Campaigns and Elections Committee). Shaun Roberts, Director of Campaigns and Elections at HQ gave us a short presentation on the messaging work and took questions. I can’t share the briefing with you of course, as it is confidential, but you will be seeing the outcomes very soon from FCEC and HQ teams.

Content that the new messaging was in place and high-quality, the discussion then progressed onto the details of the supporter scheme proposals.

As with the last meeting, the contentious issues were around whether to charge a fee to register as a supporter and what rights those supporters should then be given.

At the last meeting, we had asked a lot of questions of the HQ staff, looking for data on membership subscriptions, donations etc. Using these, and some confidential research results that we had requested (paid for by a donor), we eventually came to a consensus view.

So, the FPDC recommendation is that the Party should introduce a registered supporter scheme. 

This was a rather unusual meeting, in that it was dominated by one very large agenda item, discussing the idea of a registered supporters scheme. In fact, for the first time, we applied our 9pm meeting guillotine and postponed some other discussions to our July meeting.

We started in the normal way with staff reports. The committee was enormously impressed by the retention rates the Membership team have achieved this quarter, currently standing at 94.5%. That’s a fantastic achievement, and a credit to the team’s hard work. The Membership team have also started tracking Exit data – reasons why people have decided to leave. This is a really helpful innovation. It will be shared with State Parties but not beyond that for now, as it is obviously quite sensitive data. The team agreed to consider whether there was a way to share the data with local parties, but we need to find a reliable, secure system to do that and this is a brand new metric we are monitoring. I’ll let you know if that starts to be filed somewhere that local parties can view it. 

We did also note the changes to the Membership Incentive scheme – essentially this model gives a percentage of each member’s joining subscription back to the local party they live in. The system is being changed to reward renewal as well as recruitment, with a portion of subscription fees being paid to local parties in the second and third year of a person’s membership.

The Training team are doing great work too. The Autumn Conference training schedule is in the last stages of being finalised. They have slightly changed the process for allocating training sessions this year. All providers were asked to bid for courses, and given themes that the training should focus upon. Then everyone’s ideas were collated and where more than one provider wanted to run a course, they were asked to join forces, collaborate and present a joint course. We are also welcoming some new providers, to expand the training offer that members can enjoy at conference. It’s exciting to see this coming together so well and we will be monitoring feedback closely after conference to see if participants enjoy these co-presented sessions.

The Diversity and Candidates team are currently without a “Head”, as the recruitment of a replacement for Arfan Bhatti is not yet concluded. However they still submitted a report, and we were delighted to hear of some very pro-active ideas for measures that could improve diversity among our approved candidates. We look forward to more concrete suggestions once the team leader is in place.

Then we came to the largest agenda item, the idea of a registered supporters scheme.