How to get started organising a leafleting group

However little organising capacity your team has, you can arrange flyering action. This guide provides you with some things to think about when organising a group flyering action:

• pointers on how to make the most of it
• keep your team safe and comfortable, and
• avoid unnecessary aggro.

Leafleting on the street

The easiest way to give out flyers is to stand on the street, preferably in a busy place, and hand them to passers-by.

Can you organise a small group and make a fun, social activity of it? You could publicise it as an event in advance, encouraging newbies to get involved and meet other anti-Tory campaigners.

When setting up a leafleting action, think about:

• Is there a nice cafe, or a nearby home of one of your team, that you can arrange to meet in at the start of the action, and/or unwind and socialise in afterwards?
• Where is the nearest loo that your team will be able to use during the action?
• Do any of your team have any additional needs that you need to take into account for them to be included?

Organising door-to-door leafleting

The other method of distributing leaflets is to post them door-to-door.

If you have a box of flyers but minimal organising capacity, it’s perfectly possible to give the flyers out to your friends and campaign colleagues to deliver in an ad-hoc fashion. The least demanding ask of people who want to help is to ask them to leaflet their own street and a couple of neighbouring streets.

We’ve prepared a separate list of tips for door-to-door leafleters, which you might like to email to your leafleters before they start their leafleting round, or print out copies of to give to them with their pile of leaflets.

If you have some capacity to organise a leafleting operation which is a little more systematic, then:

• Print out a map of the area you’re covering.
• Colour in the streets that have been covered.
• Unless you know your area well, you might not know where there are dense blocks of flats – meaning that the number of letterboxes is much higher than you will have anticipated.
• A handy way to check how many properties there are in any given street is to go to the property website Zoopla, select the House prices and values tab and input the name of the street you want to check. The number of properties on that street will appear just above the property listings.

Here is some guidance for planning a door-to-door leafleting operation:

• 2 hours at a time is usually enough to ask of your volunteers.
• In a dense terraced street it is possible to do 200 leaflets per hour. In leafy suburbia with big front gardens, it can be 100 per hour.
• Don’t ask each person to try to carry too many leaflets at a time – you will be bending for floor level letterboxes or using both hands to hold open some of the vertical ones to get all the leaflet through. Hurting your back will not help us. There also may be steps to basement flats and divided houses.
• In general, don’t ask people to leaflet before 8am or after 9pm if still light or after 8pm when it is dark.

It’s also a good idea if possible to gently check that the people you’ve given leaflets to have indeed delivered them. People do forget!