11 ways CLPs should invest in their online presence before the election

With an election nine months in the future and with the Conservative’s enjoying a fiscal advantage over us in terms of election funds, it’s imperative that we make use  of the resources available. For MP’s and Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) in marginal areas, one of the most cost effective and efficient investments that can be made is developing an appealing web presence and a dynamic and interactive relationship with the electorate via the various social media streams. At the moment, in all too many cases this is being completely sidelined.

When I started redeveloping Kate Green’s site, I conducted a completely unscientific survey of the existing websites of MP’s and CLP’s for inspiration and examples of current best practice. Instead I found a bleak landscape of scrappy-looking, identical “Web Creator” sites, incomprehensible “Nationbuilder” sites, websites for Shadow Cabinet members built on WordPress -with the default templates – and Blogger, and websites for MP that hadn’t been updated at all since the last election (and not just MP’s who had lost their seats!).  Many voters’ first point of contact is with a constituency website, and so many look unprofessional. This implies that we’re not bothered about either presenting a welcoming image or keeping constituents up to speed with the great work that we and our MP’s do.

In many cases CLP’s will have one or more people among the membership with the necessary skill set to bring a constituency or MP’s site up to speed, possibly alongside professional experience of using social media in other areas of their work. In places  where there aren’t these people, CLP’s should prioritise funds for paying web developers and social media professionals in the run up to May. While online campaigning can never replace feet on the ground in an election campaign, it can be a way of getting our message out to a huge number of people extremely quickly and (in terms of return) cheaply if, and only if, it’s done properly.

I would the suggest the following guidelines as an outline for a good constituency site:

1. The “look” of the website and the structure of the content should reflect the constituency and the work and character of the MP or candidate. Be innovative and imaginative and express love for where you live and pride in the work that your party does there. Party guidelines in terms of fonts and logo’s are loose enough to leave plenty of room to play with.
2. Use lots of visual content where possible, images and galleries are more likely to be shared. Embedded Youtube videos are especially effective.
3. Consider Google and other search engines when titling videos and images and producing written content, this can dramatically improve the number of visits to your site. Keyword meta-tags are less important these days but good page descriptions in meta-tags can work wonders.
4. Make the tone of the copy and visual media informal, people respond better to content that comes from the heart and from personal experience of the effect of policies on their lives and those of others than they do to rhetoric. Leave sound bites to telly, radio and “Thunderclap”. In the case of CLP sites, use a variety of voices for diversity and to strike a chord with as broad an audience of potential supporters as possible.
5. Make sure that your template works responsively. Many people (around a third in Kate’s case) look at websites on smartphones and tablets and the website should be able to rearrange the content to the device, not present a teeny tiny eyestrain version of the desktop site.
6. Use the site to recruit supporters, at least have a form where people can subscribe to a regular mailshot, also include links to the main party site, especially information about membership.
7. Incorporate as many different ways of interacting with the site as possible, surveys and polls. Link to these regularly via social media. People love to have their say!
8. Integrate your site with your social media streams as far as you possibly can, at the very least:
   1. Embed content from all of your social media streams on the site, with the option to follow or “like” the various social media accounts.
   2. Provide the option of sharing all pieces of content over as many different social media streams as possible. http://www.sharethis.com/ provides a pretty straightforward tool for doing this.
   3. Allow users to comment on and discuss your articles and transmit the discussion over social media by including Facebook comments boxes in your content. Bear in mind that these will have to be moderated though.
9. Work on developing bespoke content for each of your social media streams; avoid just copying content across from one to the other as this has a serious effect on visibility. School yourself in the dark arts of Facebook reach, I’ve outlined a few pointers here: http://icanweb.co.uk/blog/6-improving-facebook-reach-visibility
10. Coordinate your content publication with your social media for maximum impact. Most Content Management Systems allow you to schedule publication of content, synchronise this with tweets and Facebook posts using a scheduling tool such as https://hootsuite.com/ to link to your content as it is published.
11. Ensure a constant throughput of content, the more the better, update the site at least a couple of times a week, each time transmitting links to the new content via social media, but also to your wider site and most importantly to the underlying message: VOTE LABOUR IN 2015!