Project date: 24 June 2024
Project link: https://localstats.uk/
Problem Addressed
After fourteen years in government, the Conservative Party’s policy impact became a central focus of electoral scrutiny. Finding data about the impact of their policies at a national level was straightforward – analysis carried out by national media outlets made this information widely accessible for campaigners. But in a political context where hyperlocal campaigning is increasingly salient, we sought to equip campaigners with these statistics at a local level.
Approach & Implementation
Built by Campaign Labber Will, this tool allowed users to input their postcodes into the tool:
Which then returned relevant local statistics in an easily shareable format:
Image downloading and instant sharing across multiple social media platforms were two functionalities built into the tool from the beginning in order to facilitate frictionless sharing.
The tool also allowed users to delve deeper into the data by clicking on the ‘Show all statistics’ link underneath – this would return more granular data, list sources and generate graphs representing the data:
Evidence & Evaluation
The policy stats tool sought to be able to equip activists with the local data they needed to craft compelling narratives in their campaigning, whilst at the same time giving access to easily sharable graphics for social media dissemination. In terms of functionality, then, the tool was a success.
Unfortunately, the sudden nature of the snap election meant the tool could not be deployed until a week before polling day, giving it a very limited window for use by campaigners. Still, we believe that providing campaigners with access to information and data they would otherwise lack is a powerful use-case of political technology. Our hope is that this tool can serve as a concrete example of what this looks like in practice, while also providing open-source code that future progressive campaign teams can adapt and expand upon for upcoming elections.
Resources
- Documentation link: https://github.com/CampaignLab/policy_stats_tool/blob/master/README.md
- Code repository: https://github.com/CampaignLab/policy_stats_tool
Contact: [email protected]
7 May 2025