This really was a word of mouth election

By Douglas Alexander

Amidst all the phone calls expressing sympathy and sadness from friends and colleagues this week I’ve been asked one question more than any other – how exactly did the Labour Party, against all the odds, manage to deprive the Tories of their so-wanted, and expected, overall majority last Thursday?

In the wake of the economic and expenses crisis, and with millions of pounds being pumped in to help Tory candidates in marginal seats and a cash-strapped Labour Party with a third the number of staff it had in 2005, you can understand the bewilderment.

But here’s the simple thing we understood when many months ago we developed our word of mouth strategy – committed people matter more than limitless cash.

Of course, word of mouth is not a new concept. At our best we have always asked our supporters to speak to their friends, work colleagues and neighbours – but we knew this time round that it was going to be more important than ever. This was not just down to the aching financial imbalance between the parties; we recognised that peer-to-peer was a far more credible way to get your message across in a context where trust in politics and politicians was so low – and that this would be the most effective kind of campaign to run in a networked age.

And we knew that new media made word of mouth easier than ever before. With disciplined determination and rigorous focus, and inspired by what we learnt directly from the Obama campaign, the Labour Party has over recent years been building a campaign infrastructure that would mobilise and empower our supporters to spread our message for us. We long ago realised that simply relying on the old techniques and channels of communication wouldn’t be enough.

With the Tories engaging in a one-way broadcast campaign – the start and end of their new media campaign being to spend vast amounts of money on Google Adwords to get more friends on Facebook and more views on YouTube so they could broadcast even more one-way messages at people – Labour set about developing a strategy designed at mobilising and motivating people to help us where we know it matters most – on the doorstep.

So we built our campaign events system, on Membersnet, making it easier than ever for our supporters to find out how they could get involved in the campaign. Over 5,000 campaign events were locally organised and advertised on Membersnet during the course of the campaign.

And we recognised that deploying volunteers from the moment they expressed interest in helping was crucial – so within hours of joining or volunteering via our website you would receive a phone call from our dedicated volunteer team, giving you information on how to get involved in the nearest marginal seat to where you lived.

We always knew the final days would be critical and so we planned to change gears with the aim of changing the result in marginal seats across the country. One innovation was texting tens of thousands of our supporters on eve of poll. Those messages directed them to the party website, which had a special splash page for the final two days, and requested their details. Those parting with their details received the phone call – and thousands of new volunteers were dispatched to work to get the Labour vote out on polling day in key marginal seats as a result of our initiative.

To their immense and enduring credit, our supporters rose to the challenge we set them. From the beginning of the year they were making three times the number of doorstep contacts per week that we were making in 2005 in the run up to the last general election. In the final few weeks of the campaign this amounted to nearly half a million doorstep conversations per week and in the final week this grew to 100,000 conversations per day.

But the key metric for measuring whether any of this made a difference at the end of the day has to be in terms of votes cast and seats won. And the fact that we held so many of our most marginal seats like Westminster North, Hammersmith and Oxford East – and even ended up gaining seats like Chesterfield and Rochdale – can in large part be attributed to the hard work of our candidates and supporters and Labour’s disciplined and focused word of mouth campaign strategy.

And amidst the disappointment of this week we can all take heart from a central insight of this campaign – that committed and engaged volunteers, campaigners and candidates still do matter, and indeed were the decisive factor in so many of the seats that denied David Cameron the majority to which he has long felt he was entitled.

Of course, we must now build on this strong foundation – and the fact that since Friday we have recruited 10,000 new members bodes well for the future of our party and for our ability to deliver more word of mouth victories in the years ahead.