While the reflections from the 2019 General Election are still being worked through, we’re most proud of the work we did to build and strengthen people-powered movements across the country in the lead up to polling day.
The Stop School Cuts campaign for the 2019 General Election took place in the context of an extremely divided electorate and a highly saturated digital campaigning space compared to 2017. The context was challenging but we gave thousands of people the chance to get involved in election campaigning, outside of party politics.
The vision for the 2019 campaign was to make sure parliamentary candidates pledged to reverse the cuts that schools had suffered since 2015, once and for all. In partnership with Outlandish, we built a digital tool that enabled 13,401 people to pressure 884 candidates to pledge to reverse school cuts.
Polling from Ipsos MORI showed that after Brexit and the NHS, education was the third biggest issue at this election for voters in England. This issue rose in influence from 24% to 28% in lead up to polling day.
We also know that, of the third of parents who had heard about the Stop School Cuts campaign at this election, nearly 60% had seen our social media content and half had seen our printed materials. Our supporter base also grew by thousands over the course of the campaign and we mobilised nearly 1,000 volunteers in 5 weeks to work on data entry, turning out people to events and spreading the word on social media and at the school gates.
Transforming the lives of working people was at the heart of our election campaign with Labour Unions — the 12 trade unions affiliated with the Labour Party, who together represent the collective voices of over 4 million people.
As soon as the election was called, we worked in partnership with Labour Unions to galvanise the labour movement into action. Over five weeks, we developed core messaging to showcase the best of the Party’s policies, produced a film about the power of one-to-one conversations at the doorstep, and designed pledge cards for Labour Party members to hand out in their workplaces and communities.
We also executed a carefully considered ad campaign, targeting thousands of swing voters in battleground constituencies around the country. Our creative premise highlighted the problems facing a particular constituency and provided Labour’s policy solution, from the Green Industrial Revolution to decent work for all.
By putting empowering photographs of working people at the forefront of the campaign, we reached over 500,000 potential voters with our messaging online and increased the monthly users of Labour Unions’ social media page by over 350%.
Our work led to coverage on the BBC Asian Network and drove Commonwealth and youth voter registration in the lead up to the deadline.
The 2019 General Election was an opportunity to educate migrants living in the UK about their right to vote. We worked in partnership with Citizens UK to launch a powerful tool to encourage people who might otherwise have stayed at home, to exercise their democratic right and learn more about how they can take part in electoral politics.
In just 5 days, we created a micro visual identity and a tactical voting tool for the campaign to take off as well as a video to drive youth voter registration. The ‘Can I vote?’ tool launched in November 2019, in 6 different languages, giving voters from immigrant backgrounds a way to find out whether they could be a part of polling day. We also rolled out ads to target people with specific demographic interests and inform them about their right to vote.
