US fightback against Trump inspired us to launch Labour tech campaign

Today we officially launch Tech for Labour.

We are a grassroots network empowering tech talent to volunteer for change. We match this tech talent to Labour candidates for local, national and regional elections.

Our overriding mission is to support and modernise progressive political campaigns at all levels, by providing them with game-changing access to world-class technical and digital expertise and hence change political outcomes.

So how does this work in practice? In simple terms volunteers with tech skills put their skills to use in local campaigns to help Labour candidates win.

We currently have 30 individuals who have agreed to volunteer their time to assist Labour candidates with their online efforts. Their backgrounds range from working in small startups to working in SMEs to being former Facebook and Google employees.

The ways we can help candidates can be as simple as helping them create a website, advice on how to use Twitter and Facebook all the way up to using data to effectively target undecided voters in their campaign.

We have been inspired by the success of our sister organisation in the US, Tech for Campaigns. Set up in the aftermath of Trump’s electoral victory, Tech for Campaigns quickly recruited people with tech skills and put them to work on local House of Delegates races.

The results have been extraordinary so far. In November Tech for Campaigns deployed 150 tech volunteers to work on campaigns in Virginia. The result was that Tech for Campaigns played a big role in the biggest Democratic seat gain since 1899.

Out of the 12 campaigns that volunteers worked on, they won 10. This included winning nine seats from the Republicans. Even more impressively five of these seats were viewed as nearly impossible to win for the Democrats by pollster 588. Tech for Campaigns currently have more than 3,000 volunteers who will be deployed in upcoming elections.

We all know that Labour ran a fantastic digital operation at the 2017 election. We comprehensively out campaigned the Tories at a national level. The Tories are currently pouring more and more money into digital campaigning, and we should expect them to up their game substantially by the time the next election comes along.

Tech for Labour is a independent grassroots efforts that we think compliments Labour HQ efforts by focusing less on the national debate and more on the local level. Indeed we will be focusing on helping council candidates get elected initially.

We have decided to work with council candidates first for a three reasons. Firstly timing – Labour faces a hugely important set of council elections in 2018. There are all out elections in Birmingham and in London we stand a real chance of winning seats and councils that we have never won before.

Secondly there is a big opportunity for council candidates to improve their online campaigning. Nationbuilder is great but we know the understanding of it and costs involved are prohibitive to many of our council candidates. Good engagement online will never supplant our traditionally strong ground game, but in close seats it can help make the difference between a tight loss and a narrow win.

Thirdly councillors are the cornerstones of our democracy. They are the unsung heroes of our party who positively affect people’s lives on a daily basis.

So this is call to action for you. Are you a Labour voter, member or supporter with tech skills? If so we would love you to be part of our volunteer base community.

This is a cross section of what the current volunteer base looks like:

• social and marketing – helping candidates engage with voters on social media
• data and analytics – analysing trends and helping candidates hone their message
• engineering – building websites and landing pages
• video content – creating videos about the candidates

Do you have any of these skills and would you be interested in helping Labour candidates local to you?

If you would like to volunteer for change you can do so online or by emailing us. If you are a candidate and feel you could benefit from tech expertise in your campaign then please get in touch.

Our goal is to build our community of volunteers to 100 by the end of the February. We will then work with council candidates standing in 2018 to improve their online communications and help them win the seat for Labour

Long term we want to create a community of skilled, volunteers who are excited to use their specific skills to help local campaigns have access to best in class digital, marketing, creative, and web development talent.

Chris Worsey is founder of Tech for Good start-up Coursematch and a Labour councillor in the West Midlands. You can find him on twitter @chrisworsey

Contact Tech For Labour at [email protected]