A guide to ‘winning in May’: Interview with Campaign Lab

There is a basement office in central London where a group of dedicated individuals are working on something that really matters. Campaign Lab describes itself as ‘a community of politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and campaigners who are working together to develop innovative election tools and improve the way we analyse and understand campaigning’.

I recently met with co-founder Hannah O’Rourke to discuss the work Campaign Lab have published to support Labour activists and candidates for the upcoming (and future) elections. Across my time with Hannah, it became incredibly clear that the team at Campaign Lab have some of the most important minds for the next generation of the progressive movement. The responsibility that comes with that is unavoidably heavy.

The co-founder gave me a walk through of the ‘Winning in May’ briefing packs which offer a series of six short guides and tools that offer a more effective and efficient way for candidates to campaign. They are designed for all levels of campaign experience, with some targeted specifically for first-time volunteers or candidates and others for those already running sophisticated operations.

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Tips and Tricks for local campaigners is the first pack to browse for those hitting the doors over the next few weeks. The pack stresses the necessity of hyper-local campaigning as the most effective method for Labour activists.

“Hyper-local campaigns aren’t just national or council wide issues wrapped in local language… you have to literally go street-by-street.” Hannah explained the importance of this, supported by data Campaign Lab had collected from an experiment they ran. The organsiation used QR codes on 900 leaflets to test the issues and languages people would engage with from campaign literature. 

“The people that scan the QR codes lived within 500 metres to a kilometer of each of the issues. That was all the scans.” Political salience, Hannah explained, is highly localised, whereas generic party messaging was more ineffective.

Leaflets telling individuals to scan so they could ‘Find out about Labour’ were pointless: “nobody scanned that. Nobody cares.” Whereas specific local concerns such as “do we need a crossing at this local school?”, would prompt engagement. This led Hannah to a clear strategic conclusion, “if you’re going to do hyper local campaigning, you have to actually get local.”

The pack then encourages candidates and activists knocking on doors, to lead with place based questions and use both local Facebook groups and local press to find the most effective problem for an area to campaign on.

“Mapping where you’ve got local groups…if you’re trying to reach people this has lists.” Campaign Labs have created a tool to help candidates find their local Facebook groups, which can be found in the pack. We then discussed constituency and community mapping in more detail, where I was able to see another tool in action.

The ‘constituency explorer’ aggregates local institutions for strategic positioning, Hannah explained. It provides information for candidates on “local community centres, churches, local media, schools, charities…trying to understand how [the candidate] can get to where people are.”

One question Campaign Lab understands progressives are struggling to answer, is how best to hold Reform UK candidates to account. They’ve created a selection of tools to support candidates with attack lines and methods to do just that. Campaign Lab have identified that pointing out poor behavioural patterns, highlighting risk and demonstrating incompetence in local reform candidates is a more effective attack strategy than relying on talking points related to their national party.

“Attacks on Nigel Farage might land…but [attacks are] more effective if you know the local candidate has done something really bad.”

The emphasis is on behavioural credibility rather than ideological disagreement: “it’s more about their behaviour than what they say,” Hannah explained.

Tools such as “Reform Exposed” databases and attendance trackers enable this strategy by aggregating negative information:“you can very easily… identify dirt… in a location-based way.”

Campaign Lab’s provide their own ‘Dirt Digger’ tool – a website that collects negative local news stories about Reform Councillors. They have also created an attendance tracker, showing when Reform and Conservative councillors are trying to skip out on their duties of local representation.

WardWatch is another of their tools I was able to spend some time using. WardWatch is an AI-driven research tool that generates summaries of local political performance. Hannah explained it as “AI research on councillor performance” designed to “very quickly be able to figure out what they’ve done.”

Not only is this effective for aggregating a selection of Reform based attack lines for candidates to communicate, but also helpful in keeping track of their own wins.

“Councillors are being really bad at telling you what they’ve done” says O’Rourke. This tool will help them do just that.

Outputs include synthesised achievements tailored to voter segments. For example: “it will come up with like the ten achievements in that ward that would appeal to the group that we’ve selected.” 

To test this, I used the tool to find out what has been happening in the ward where I grew up, in Bolton. Admittedly I was not necessarily the best case study to provide anecdotal evidence, having moved to London almost two years ago.

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However, I was still very impressed with the way the AI tool could scrape the relevant council channels to provide information on what my local councillors are up to. For example, I did not know about beneficial initiatives on the local environment that had been occurring while I was still living there.

The tool certainly helped to demonstrate not only the wins Labour councillors and candidates could be shouting about, but also identify areas that they have failed to discuss.

Campaign Lab have also identified an issue with mobilisation for this election. “Lots of people are struggling with getting members out,” which creates a significant operational challenge when trying to engage with residents.

To address this, Campaign Lab provides a pack specifically on identifying the best methods to mobilise your campaign, including tips on context and framing for members.

One tool they provide to support on this is their ‘Canvas Coach’ where users can “practice having a conversation on the doorstep with AI.” Canvas coach will provide a chat bot for users to try out their techniques and messaging.

It provides you with the information of the voter, in my case it was ’37 year old Michael Davis’ I had to converse with. At the end of the conversation, the AI provides a score out of ten for the user and tips on how to improve for that voter. This is to especially helpful for first time campaigners, with the simulation aiming to remove any pre-existing fear around the prospect of doorstep conversation. 

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The remaining packs on the website focus on voter persuasion, turning out your voter base and campaigning on social media.

“I mean, in an ideal world, all our councillors would know what they have to do and what they’ve done… I think where you’ve got good councillors, they should just know this. But where you’re starting from scratch or you’ve got a situation where, say, you’re taking over from a councillor and there’s not many notes, you might want to start with this as a starting point. Or, if you’re, say, trying to attack a record. This might be a good starting point.”

For any local councillors, candidates or activists who want to learn more about the tools, then visit: https://campaignlab.uk/project/campaign-lab-winning-in-may/