December VoteSource Newsletter

Welcome to the December edition of the VoteSource Newsletter.

Missed our last edition? Catch up by clicking here.

Or click here to browse all previous editions.

Annual Register Rollover

We will start to receive files for the Annual Electoral Register Rollover from December 1st. This reflects the annual canvass of electors carried out in the Autumn every year. In addition to adding and deleting electors, it reorders the Electoral Roll number of constituents.

Please note that not all Local Authorities provide their annual rollover files promptly on the 1st of December. We do chase stragglers but this can delay your rollover locally.

You can check the status of your rollover within VoteSource. If you click into the Register tile and then click on the next Register tile, the system will display the loaded registers currently available. This is also where you can check if your monthly updates have been applied, but you will be looking for Annual Register in the left-hand column for this year’s rollover. Remember - until Annual Register appears with a date effective of 2021 and with Loaded in the far-right status column, your annual rollover has not been applied.

Once your Annual Register has been loaded into VoteSource:

• Please check your register and report any concerns to the Support team, providing examples.
• Improve the matching of records by using the manual match process in the Drop Off section and the merge ability.

We strongly recommend that when you come to match your records together you go to the Drop Off section of VoteSource, found by clicking on the Register tile, select your publishing authority and the criteria you wish to search for, I.E. Voting Intention of Conservative and then export the responses to a spreadsheet.

You can then look up each record via Constituent search and merge the record if they are still at the same address using the Merge ability.

The advantage of using this method is that you can merge records at any time – there is no time constraint like with Drop Offs.

Instructions on how to merge records can be found in the Help Centre:

“How to merge a constituent record that’s not matched to an electoral record to a constituent record”

“Drop off – How to extract a list of Drop Offs to merge post annual rollover”

If you would rather use the Drop Off section – which will provide you with possible matches for the dropped off record, please follow the instructions below. Please be aware that the drop off procedure is time sensitive, once your first monthly update on the new year has been applied you should no longer continue matching drop off records. You can of course then start using the merge ability at that time.

To find the drop off section from the VoteSource homepage click on the Register tile and then Drop Off.

You can then select the Publishing Authority and the Published Register you wish to match to.

You will be able to select constituents who have “dropped off the register” based on a number of criteria – e.g., Membership, has a specific Voting Intention etc.

The system will allow you to manually match these records to potential records in the system.

The following user guide can be found in the Help Centre on VoteSource to assist with Drop Offs:

“Drop Off – Annual Roll Over”

Once your first monthly update has been applied post your annual rollover you can no longer use drop off for the previous year.

Once the first monthly update has been applied, you should only use the drop off section to match records that have split during the monthly update.

You will only be able to merge drop offs for each monthly update until next year’s annual rollover.

If you have any questions, please contact the Support team on 020 7984 8000 or votesourcesupport@conservatives.com

Best Practice

1. Have you gone through your user list and checked only current association officers and volunteers have access?

These checks should be carried out regularly throughout the year and are very important. All recipients of this newsletter have the ability and therefore the responsibility of ensuring only approved individuals have access to VoteSource data.

To do this, go to Users, click on Existing Users and you will find lists of accounts recorded by the first letter of their last name. If you find a user account that is no longer required, simply click on their name and then click the Details option. This is found above User Security. The page that loads will contain a Delete Account option.

Please note: You may find a user that you do not recognise, this does not mean they necessarily have access to your data. Remember to check carefully their Electoral Area Permission. It could be that they are a registered elector in your area but have access to another area legitimately. If in doubt, contact VoteSource Support and we will be happy to investigate.

2. Have you checked if your annual rollover register has been applied?

If it has, have you checked the drop off section and started matching records to save their data?

If you need guidance on the above, please read the Annual Rollover article in this Newsletter.

3. Have you archived target audiences & delivery rounds you no longer require?

Remember, target audiences & delivery rounds are snapshots of the electoral register when they are created – they do not update with monthly or annual rollover files. If you have created target audiences in 2020 expecting to use them in 2021 – you will not be campaigning effectively with up to date electors.

To archive a target audience, go to Campaigns and then click on the Target Audiences tile. You will then be able to search through all available target audiences in the area(s) you have access to. Simply click on the target audience you wish to archive and when it has loaded, select the red tile labelled Finish and Archive.

You can also search for target audiences using the Created by me tile and the Quick search filter.

An important note is that if you subsequently realise you needed a target audience that you have archived, they can be re-activated via the Archived Target tile.

Please do ensure you take some time to tidy up your target audiences. Removing unrequired ones will help organise this section of VoteSource ahead of the important campaign work next year.

Hint: any target audiences you created with the title “test” can probably be archived!

VoteSource Support team Christmas holiday timetable

The VoteSource Support team will be on Christmas holidays from midday 22nd of December until 9am Wednesday 5th of January.

During this time, any phone calls will go straight to answerphone. The team will be checking voicemails and emails over the holiday period but will only deal with emergency issues.

We would recommend emailing us if your problem is urgent.

Normal service will resume from the 5th of January.

Our contact details are as follows if you are not already aware:

020 7984 8000 votesourcesupport@conservatives.com

2022 Local Election Targets

A first cut of targets for next year’s Local Elections will be loaded to VoteSource before Christmas. We will refresh and update these throughout the new year, but should any campaigns want to get off to a flying start, they can use these updated targets. The targets are split into the following groups, which should be familiar:

The Turnout group are people who, if they vote, are likely to vote Conservative. They are split into four audiences – 1,2,3 and Postal Voters. Voters in Turnout 1 are the top priority – because they are the sorts of people whose decision whether to vote or not is most influenced by canvassing. Turnout 2 are second priority and 3 third.

The Persuasion group includes people who are very likely to vote, and who are likely to be considering voting Conservative. There is also a separate group for Persuasion targets with a Postal Vote.

The P1 group are people we think were likely to usually be Labour voters but who voted Conservative for the first time in the General Election in 2019. Many of them kept voting for us in May - and we want these folks to make voting Conservative a habit.

The P3 group are people we think were usually Conservative voters but may have been considering voting for another party during the General Election in 2019, or in local elections this year. We want to keep talking to these types of voters to make sure, if they did defect, they come back.

And this year, there’s an extra group - VoterID. These are the people who we don’t have much information about - so are trying to encourage local campaign teams to canvass them. They might be new to the area, or they might just have not filled in a survey they’ve been sent. But any information we can gather about these sorts of people will help us put them in to the right sort of audience closer to May’s elections.

If you have any questions about any of these audiences, or how we plan to update and refresh them then please email insight@conservatives.com.