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.

Helpdesk Christmas Break

The Helpdesk will be closed from 2pm Tuesday 24th December until 9am Thursday 2nd January 2025. During this time you will still be able to send emails to helpdesk@conservatives.com or leave answer messages via 020 7984 8000

The team will then pick these up and respond to them from 2nd January 2025.

VoteSource Essential Maintenance – Making it faster & more secure.

In January we’ll be carrying out work on VoteSource to make it faster when running selections and loading screens – and to improve security of your data.

During the General Election local teams running selections created over 700,000,000 rows of new data in the database – so we’ll be tidying up lots of this unnecessary data. Archiving very out of date target audiences which are no longer active, to make the system work faster.

And we’re upgrading the way VoteSource loads from screen to screen – to make navigating quicker too.

Whilst also increasing the security of our data – something that’s increasingly important in an increasingly dangerous online world.

This essential maintenance is designed to help make your life that little bit easier by making selections run much quicker – but it’s such a massive piece of work, VoteSource will unfortunately have to be taken offline for a week in January.

Between Sunday January 19th and Saturday January 25th the following will be unavailable:

• VoteSource Website and Mobile App
• VoteSource Database – no background queries can be made during this time
• Membership Microsite – it will not be possible to amend membership records locally but it will still be possible for people to join and renew their membership online.

So yes, in effect, no one will be able to use the system locally in any capacity during this maintenance window.

Why have we selected this particular week?

We have selected this particular week for two reasons. Firstly, there are only a very small number of council by-elections scheduled this week. And secondly, we’re keen to get this work completed before the 2nd phase of electoral rollovers – with many councils having delayed the supply of new registers until late January/early February. We want to get this maintenance work completed beforehand – so the maintenance work does not impact on the processing of these new electoral registers. That means Associations in areas where councils have delayed publication of new electoral registers will be able to use the new registers for campaigning as quickly as possible.

Naturally you will be wondering “how will this benefit me and my campaigning plans?”. The following are the key major improvements this work plans to achieve:

• Running times will be streamlined. Target audiences will run noticeably quicker as well as export downloads.
• Navigation between one page to another within VoteSource will be faster, pages of information will load more quickly.
• VoteSource will be better maintained with crucial behind the scenes processes running more smoothly. Reducing the future likelihood of unplanned or emergency outages occurring – reducing the risk of VoteSource being down during crucial election periods.

FAQs

Can I still request data if the application is offline?

No, as this is a big task with our main database, the database will be unavailable for everyone to query including our technical teams here at CCHQ.

So, all extracts will need to be done before the maintenance work starts.

If you have local by-election campaigns ongoing or pending, your designated member of the field team will be able to help you run all the possible data-sets you might need ahead of time. And where by-elections are taking place during this week – the data team will be providing data-sets to help you carry on campaigning as effectively as possible.

NB: At present only 4 local by-elections are expected to be held during the week when the system will be offline. Please advise the local government team if a new by-election is called soon.

If I have campaigning planned, what do I do? What about by-elections?

You can still export canvass cards before the outage, but you will not be able to use mobile canvassing during the week when VoteSource is offline.

We know this isn’t ideal, but there’s never a perfect time to schedule such an operation and we have selected the optimum period with least disruption to campaigning.

Do you know the exact time you will start and end?

• The system will be down from 11am Sunday 19th January 2025.

• The system will be available again from 11pm Saturday 25th January 2025.

Why have we selected this particular week?

We have selected this particular week for two reasons. Firstly, there are only a very small number of council by-elections scheduled this week. And secondly, we’re keen to get this work completed before the 2nd phase of electoral rollovers – with many councils having delayed the supply of new registers until late January/early February. We want to get this maintenance work completed beforehand – so the maintenance work does not impact on the processing of these new electoral registers. That means Associations in areas where councils have delayed publication of new electoral registers will be able to use the new registers for campaigning as quickly as possible.

What happens about membership payments?

Membership payments will be delayed by a week due to this process.

This means no automated processes can run and no new payments can be entered manually.

Once the systems come online the payments will go through and catchup.

However, people will still be able to join and renew memberships online.

What happens about membership emails?

Membership emails (e.g. automated renewal reminders) will also be delayed by a week. When the system comes back online the pending emails will be sent out.

Will you be deleting any of my data? Absolutely not. Data will not be deleted. Simply stored in a more efficient manner.

Will it take the full week to complete this process?

We will have to review this towards the end of the work – but taking the system offline is the safest and quickest way to ensure we can get the most done in the shortest time.

Can I still call support?

The Helpdesk team will still be contactable via helpdesk@conservatives.com or on 020 7984 8000. And please contact the team if you have any further questions.

Annual Rollover

Information previously sent out via VoteSource Newsletter on 25/10/24 & 29/11/24.

We are pleased to report that we have now completed annual rollover for all local authorities who informed us they were providing their files in December.

A full list of the 193 completed authorities can be found in the posted news article on VoteSource:

https://votesource.uk/support/news/newsview/296

We are also aware that due to the timing of the General Election some local authorities are delaying publication until 2025.

The following link will take you to an article on VoteSource listing the local authorities delaying until 2025:

https://votesource.uk/support/news/newsview/297

If your local authority is delaying until 2025 you still have time to check the following carefully and prepare accordingly.

What should you be aware of before rollover?

Walk Routes

Walk routes are linked to the current polling districts. When we receive rollover files new polling districts are created. We do our best to keep walk routes where possible, but we usually cannot save everything due to these changes.

In the past we have tried to assist users who have lost many walk routes by providing breakdowns of which streets were assigned to which walk route.

This will no longer be possible due to staffing numbers, but you can extract such lists from VoteSource yourself provided you have the right level of access.

We would strongly recommend that you plan ahead and manually generate an excel spreadsheet for each polling district.

Instructions on how to do this are as follows:

1. Click on the Campaigns tile.
2. Scroll down the next page and click on the Walk Routes tile.
3. Select your electoral geography type and corresponding electoral area, e.g. Parliamentary and South Dorset.
4. Select a polling district, e.g. CHC1
5. If walk routes have been created you can click the Export to Spreadsheet option for the polling district, found on the right hand side of the page just under the map.

This process would need to be repeated for each polling district but would provide you with a guide to quickly recreate existing walk routes post rollover.

Target Audiences in VoteSource

Following annual rollover not only will roll numbers be updated, and changes made to polling districts be applied. You will also have new additions to your electoral register added.

Target audiences are snapshots of the register when they are run. They are not updated by registers being uploaded or changes to electoral geography.

As such, whilst certain activities such as canvass or survey data entry via the VoteSource website can continue post rollover, we do strongly recommend archiving older target audiences and running new ones.

Activities such as mobile canvassing will not be possible to continue on target audiences created before rollover. This is due to changing roll numbers and polling district changes.

In simple terms, you are not able to access mobile canvassing sessions set up before rollover once it has taken place.

We therefore highly recommend running new target audiences for campaign activities as soon as your annual rollover has taken place – and archiving older audiences so there is no confusion about which ones should be used to enter data by campaigners.

Not only will you have the new roll numbers in these new sessions, but you will also ensure that any new additions to the register are included for your campaigning.

If your rollover has been completed in December please ensure you read the following carefully.

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 2024 and with Loaded in the far-right status column, your annual rollover has not been applied.

• 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.

Every effort is made to ensure that all records are matched together successfully via our automated process, however, inevitably there will be some the process cannot automatically match.

This could be because the individuals have moved address, or provided data to the local authority which does not match what is stored on VoteSource, like a date of birth. In some cases, it can even be where parents share the same first name as their children. With examples like these we need your local knowledge to merge these records back together.

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 and download the spreadsheet to excel. You will then have a hard copy to work on merging records after the first monthly update of 2024.

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. Also by using the Merge ability it greatly reduces the chance of records splitting in the future.

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” https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter/ViewArticle/331

“Drop off – How to extract a list of Drop Offs to merge post annual rollover” https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter/ViewArticle/337

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 of 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.)

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

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

3. 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.

4. 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” https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter/ViewArticle/336

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 use drop offs for each monthly update until next year’s annual rollover. However, you can continue to us the merge feature, found in constituent records, at any time regardless of monthly update files or annual rollover.

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

Insight

The Insights team have been working hard to produce new quick tile target audiences to help get you started for Local Elections 2025. Click here of more information on what new audiences are available to you.

Many of you will be familiar with the Insight Team’s quick tile audiences created for specific elections. They have now produced four new ones for the local elections in 2025 to help kick start your campaigning.

These can be found from the VoteSource homepage by going to Campaigns -> Target Audiences -> New Target Audience + -> Scroll to the bottom of the page

All four audiences begin with NEW! and will identify the following electors:

Turnout1 – Likely Conservatives who we should encourage to vote.  For this election the two Turnout audiences contain all likely Conservatives – even those already quite likely to vote.

Turnout2 – Likely Conservatives who did not vote in the General Election according to marked register that has been entered.

Con-Reform – Voters we think were choosing between ourselves and the Reform Party at the General Election. In places where Reform has a candidate, we’ll have to persuade these voters, in other areas they might be more like turnout voters.

Persuasion – Contains a lot of voters who voted Conservative in GE19 but moved to Labour or Liberal Democrat in July 2024 – voters we may be able to win back in May 2025.

If you have any queries on how to run or set up these new target voter tiles, please contact helpdesk@conservatives.com

If you have questions about who the audiences are identifying please contact insight@conseravtives.com