It's election season again!
The first signs of election season can just about be seen…
In this week’s blogpost, local.2020-05-07 is go! Know a candidate for May? Add their details. Plus, it’s everyone’s favourite local democracy conference this weekend. And we’d like your help with our new website feedback question(s).
🚀 Crowdsourcing is go! 🚀
Just under three months to go and virtually all of May 2020’s elections are now in our database… so it’s time to start crowdsourcing candidate data! You know what to do…
Know of a candidate already?
- Go to our Candidates website
- Pop their name in the search field to see if we already have them in the database. If yes, update their details.
- If no, or you’re not sure it’s the same person, add a new candidate!
Want to start from scratch?
- Go to our Candidates website
- Pop your postcode in the magic box — or browse the entire list
- Go find candidate info* for that area and enter the data!
*If you’re new to this crowdsourcing fun, the best places to look for candidate news are typically twitter and local party websites. Good luck!
We’ve had some of the combined authority elections and the PCC elections in for a while, but to this we’ve now added virtually all the local council elections.
🌱 NotWestminster 🌱
Joe is literally going to Westminster tomorrow (for a review of voter engagement work at GE2019 — a summary of anything interesting to follow in next week’s blog), but secretly his heart will be in #NotWestminster, which also kicks off tomorrow, with its theme of ‘Big Hearts and Open Minds’.
Joe will join on the Saturday, where he’s co-hosting (with the marvellous Kirklees Youth Council) a workshop on civic education at the local level. What do people know about local government? How do they learn it? What could be done better? If you can’t make the workshop, ideas on a tweet to Joe please.
🕵️♀️ Did you find this blog useful? 🕵️♀️
Rhetorical question, sorry.
For a while we’ve asked the same question on our WhereDoIVote.co.uk and WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk websites: ‘Did you find this useful?’ and ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’, respectively.
We’re not really learning anything new from the data we get back, particularly on Where, which has hovered at 85-95% ‘yes’ for a few years (where we can provide an answer).
It’s thus tempting to consider a different question — or several different questions. At the moment, the easiest way to do this probably looks like linking to a survey. This will get vastly less traffic, but allows a lot more flexibility about what we ask.
We could tailor the question to relate more to the actual behaviour we’re hoping users exhibit after using our websites, such as actually voting, or being better prepared to vote, or having more trust in the system. For example:
- Has this information made you more likely to vote?
or
- Has this information made it easier for you to vote?
Though perhaps these questions are a little leading. What else could we ask or should we ask? (Alongside basic demographic questions.)
Pop any ideas in the #research channel in our Slack — or drop us an email.
📅 What’s next? 📅
More gearing up for the elections: ensuring all the technology doesn’t fall over, lots of outgoing communications to local parties, local authorities and anyone who can help get the data in; and we should really get planning a SoPN party soon…
Forward!
🦘