*UNDER CONSTRUCTION* Signal-boosting #ToryBritain truths to the nation. Helping YOU be part of the fightback.
From The Independent: The worry for Momentum and the Labour Party must be that with the resources the Conservatives have, they may soon be able to outdo them at their own game. Despite its massive reach and influence, Momentum has very few paid staff and mostly relies on the goodwill and enthusiasm of volunteers and activists.
Erika Uyterhoeven, digital officer for Momentum, writes in the Guardian: With just one paid staff member and more than 30 volunteers from Edinburgh to Miami, Momentum managed to create social media videos that were watched by nearly one in three UK Facebook users. Ordinary members made the videos. Other members shared them. Both their production and impact were consequences of the movement.
From New Statesman: By planning a long-term digital strategy, Momentum hopes to improve on Labour’s 2017 election performance. Its social media team is developing tools to analyse the success of videos and posts among each demographic (one in three people on Facebook viewed its videos during the campaign), in order to expand its reach further.
The team is also building its own online payments system – it had been using PayPal, which charges a fixed fee, meaning “losing about a quarter of our donations to the one per cent”, according to digital officer and former Bernie Sanders staff member Erika Uyterhoeven.
She is not the only former Sanders campaign worker interested in Corbynism. Supporters of the two left-wing politicians built a fruitful relationship during the election campaign, with activists coming over from the US to help train canvassers. Ben Packer, who helped code during the campaign, says: “I’m just trying to help people steal our stuff… Even though the issues are somewhat country specific, they’re analogous – you want a better National Health Service, we want some national health service; the tech is the same.”
[Read full article on New Statesman website…]
From The Week: The My Nearest Marginal website was the brainchild of Momentum and “one of the most useful weapons in [its] tech arsenal”, said The Times.
It allowed activists, particularly first-time canvassers, to easily find battleground seats and campaign more effectively for Labour and was used by more than 100,000 people.
“We reached out way beyond our own bubble – we only have 24,000 members,” said Adam Klug, one of the central Momentum team.
Momentum held “mass campaign weekends in critical seats such as Croydon Central, Derby North, Sheffield Hallam, Battersea, Leeds North West, and Brighton Kemptown”, the New Statesman reports, and in all of the targeted seats, “Conservative majorities collapsed in the face of energy and enthusiasm channelled into a movement”.
The professional nature of the movement was also a big positive. “It was like clockwork,” one volunteer told The Guardian, which says the activist had simply gone “to the front room of someone who knew she was coming” and they “told her the exact door numbers to knock on and what time to knock.
“Several sources said so many volunteers flooded the constituency that some had to be sent elsewhere.”
From Huffpost UK: Momentum’s General Election operation brought in a number of activists from the Bernie Sanders campaign in the US. The American activists’ knowhow proved vital in building an innovative and dynamic campaign to mobilise campaigners and galvanise support.
An updated version of this app was utilised by Momentum for the General Election, which supplemented our large phone banks in London and elsewhere.
Momentum also developed My Nearest Marginal, an easy to use website designed to direct activists towards their nearest key seat and help to ensure marginal constituencies had enough activists fighting for a Labour victory. More than 100,000 people used My Nearest Marginal during the General Election campaign, over four times the size of Momentum’s membership. This was one among many factors which allowed Labour to stack up votes in marginal constituencies, which pundits had assumed Labour would lose.
From BBC News Online: Momentum national organiser Emma Rees tells the BBC how Momentum’s office used a “WhatsApp cascade” on polling day, to send a #GetOutTheVote broadcast rapidly viral to 400,000 mainly young users of WhatsApp.
From The Guardian: Corbyn’s unusual appeal and status as an outsider meant that there was suddenly a huge amount of online coverage the party did not have to pay for. It secured a coveted prize of “organic sharing” – online users deciding to pass on campaign material to their friends and family voluntarily.
“The Tories spent vast amounts on digital advertising and local newspaper ads, but it was so negative that they got hardly any organic sharing – no one wanted to be associated with those messages,” said a senior campaign figure.
A video of Corbyn interjecting during Theresa May’s Facebook Live chat on ITV received 4 million views. Corbyn challenging May to a debate reached 1.4 million people. A video on May’s security record reached 2.3 million people. As for the old-school rallies, Corbyn addressed 100,000 voters at 90 events during the campaign. It was the symbolism and energy of the events, however, that gave them significance.
From Financial Times: Nearly 10m people watched leftwing videos on Facebook that appear to have turbo-charged Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign.
[Read full article on Financial Times website…] [paywalled, but one article per month can be read without registration]
From The Guardian: It’s perhaps a sad sign of the times that the posts that went all-out to attack the opposition produced the most buzz. The most engaged post for the Conservatives was the Don’t Let them Forget photo of the Treasury letter left behind by Labour’s Liam Byrne in Downing Street, which on 6 April got a 4.5% engagement rate and more than 9,000 shares.
But the overall winner, with 12,668 shares and a 9% engagement rate was Labour’s video 12 April post of George Osborne being asked 18 times by Andrew Marr where the Tories would find the money for their NHS investment pledge.