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Employing U.S. strategists in UK elections is nothing new, but importing U.S. digital tactics has proven more challenging.
The Conservative side of the aisle in the UK has made definite strides on that front over the past two elections, and the Conservative Party has a long-term goal of better integrating online fundraising and list-building tactics into its toolset.
C&E Europe spoke with Bethany Wheatley, the director of digital and political strategy at the Conservative Party, about the evolution of digital strategy in the UK and where the party is headed next.
C&E Europe: How has the use of digital evolved within the Conservative Party over the past few elections?
Wheatley: For a number of years everyone went on about how each successive election was going to be the digital election. So in 2010 the party actually did have a digital department and they started to build that operation up. I wasn’t working for the party at that time so my perspective on that period is looking in from the outside. There still wasn’t a huge social media presence. There was a bit of Facebook, a bit of Twitter, but it wasn’t truly embraced. There just wasn’t a full buy in.
Credit to the party, they saw the need to change things and so in 2013 they put together an incredible digital department. It was essentially a small marketing agency within the actual political party structure and everyone was talking to one another; it wasn’t siloed off. And so that was really what made the Conservative Party distinct from other parties in the UK. It all began working together.
C&E Europe: How do you go about deciding where to place your time and resource in terms of furthering digital as a party?
Wheatley: Just by the nature of our politics we use digital tools differently here in the UK than parties do in the United States. There is much less money per election, per seat here in the UK. We often work to tighter budgets and smaller margins than our cousins across the pond, so it’s all about working within that and finding smart ways to do so.
When it comes to where we allocate resources, we need to take a fairly firm view of what’s the most important. For example, my department is in charge of the party election broadcasts and the party political broadcasts. Every party in the UK gets a few minutes of airtime several times throughout the year. But because we don’t have television advertising this is one of the only times that you get a chance to put a video from a political party on television in the UK. So those are things we know we’re going to need to spend money on. But we also need to take into account the level of online advertising we’re going to be doing because that’s the way we get around not having TV. It just means that our budget lines look a lot different than those of U.S. campaigns.
C&E Europe: What does online fundraising look like at the party level in the UK?
Wheatley: We are actively trying to raise more and more money in small amounts from people online. That’s something that’s just opening up. There’s a different attitude toward political donations at that low level in the UK than there is in the U.S. People aren’t used to being asked on a regular basis for small donations. In the States, a presidential campaign might send two to three emails a day where the call to action is a donate button. That simply wouldn’t be tolerated in the UK. So we certainly want to innovate in that way and bring in more money, but we won’t operate the same way U.S. campaigns do. We’ve expanded the donor base significantly within the past year just simply by asking people who had never been asked before to give to the party.
C&E Europe: So it’s a cultural challenge more than anything else?
Wheatley: It is. There’s not necessarily a regulatory hurdle when it comes to online fundraising here. It is the political culture primarily. People have not been asked to donate in this way before, so you’ve got to overcome a bit of institutional resistance. It’s winning over the internal skeptics and proving to them that doing this will actually help grow our list in the long run and actually get people out on polling day. So it’s a combination of the wider cultural reticence to donating and then the institutional reticence.
C&E Europe: Have you been able to take advantage of off-the-shelf technology to further some of your goals as opposed to building everything in-house?
Wheatley: The database that we have was built in-house. But we have used other tools as well. We’ve used NationBuilder, most recently we used it in the 2015 election through to this year as a volunteer database. As we expand our view of how everything works together and look at the best way to communicate with volunteers, attitudes are changing a bit. Part of this has to do with the view of where personal data is meant to be held. There are certainly restrictions on what companies we can use if, for example, they use cloud technology instead of holding data in European servers. Though this is changing rapidly as both Microsoft and Amazon now offer cloud backups that keeps the data in Europe. But that’s stuff the Labor Party deals with as well. You have a different regulatory framework so that does impact how we use off-the-shelf technology and whether we use it. But this is constantly evolving here and I know it’s a conversation that’s happening within several political parties.
C&E Europe: Even within the regulatory framework, is it accurate to say there remains plenty you can do in terms of targeting, as long as folks are opting in?
Wheatley: It’s definitely an opt-in situation here. We are very careful on the compliance side because the framework is so different than it is on the American side. You can’t just buy a list and import data. But that forces you to be creative when you speak to people online or recruit them to join your email list or like your Facebook page. It’s doable but not to the extent that it happens in the U.S. And it’s not a bad thing that it’s more difficult to target in that way. It’s one of the reasons that we sometimes don’t, or can’t, import the technology from the U.S.
C&E Europe: What are you finding the most success with in terms of engagement online?
Wheatley: It’s no secret that we used Facebook quite a bit in the 2015 general election and that continues to be a key area for us. Our first large-scale use of Facebook live was during our Party conference in October. It definitely helped us reach well beyond the usual audience for a mid-afternoon political speech because not only could people tune in easily from their desks, the feeds remain up and rack up views for days after the conference has finished. Looking at how we use live technology more often and most effectively, as well as other platforms like Snapchat will be a key part of our 2017 plans.