June VoteSource Newsletter

Welcome to the June edition of the VoteSource Newsletter.

Missed our last edition? Catch up by clicking here.

Or click here to browse all previous editions.

Have you set up your control room for Get Out the Vote? The deadline for activation is 2pm Saturday 29th June.

Per the News Article in VoteSource, dated 08/06/24, users with Constituency Organiser or higher access can set up and prepare their control rooms for the July elections.

It is always worthwhile preparing your Get Out the Vote (GTV) operations well ahead of poll day to ensure you are ready. Therefore, we would like to remind our readers of the following.

Control Room Activation

Your control room will need to have been activated by 2pm Saturday 29th June. The deadline allows for our team to ensure everything runs smoothly for poll day. Activating a control room entails running at least one target audience selection for the parliamentary constituency your control room covers.

Control rooms cannot be set up for areas larger than a constituency – it is important that you factor this into your poll day planning.

Guidance on how to activate your control room can be found in the Help Centre on VoteSource:

VS10 – GTV – how to create a control room for GTV

https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter#!/ViewArticle/325

Committee Rooms

Whilst your control room will need to have been setup before 2pm 29th June, you will also need to create committee rooms if you wish to enter data prior to and indeed on polling day. These do not need to be setup before the deadline, but with the new feature “Add Ward committee Rooms”, found under the committee room tile, this process takes no time as the system will automatically do this for you.

Control rooms are for managing what activities and targets you have for poll day, committee rooms are for generating knocking up sheets and recording data.

Instructions on how to create a committee room can also be found in the Help Centre on VoteSource:

VS 10 – GTV – Setting up a committee room

https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter#!/ViewArticle/324

Setup – new tile found in the Control Room

The Setup tile allows to record two important thing:

Candidates – Ours and the opposition – you may be wondering why we should record who the opposition is but this will update their record so there is no chance of them being contacted. Listing our candidate allows for the creation of surveys that insert their name via replacement text.

Polling Stations – by recording the polling stations for your constituency, this allows for that address information to appear on knocking up sheets so your teams can advise people on the day where to go to vote!

More information on setting up the above can be found here:

GTV – Setup – Adding Candidates and Polling Stations

https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter#!/ViewArticle/396

Three stages of the GTV life cycle

Ultimately how GTV is used is very much up to what suits your needs and plans best. We do not create control rooms or set up target audiences and activities for you because we do not know what is going to be best for your campaign.

What we can do is offer some guidance on what we think might be useful for you to set up in your control room. The following user guides cover:

Get Out The Postal Vote (GOTPV) – setting up your control room so your knocking up sheets and data entry are set for postal vote data

VS10 – Userguide GTV – Three Stages of the GTV Cycle – Stage 1 GOTPV

https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter#!/ViewArticle/327

Get Out The Vote (GOTV) – setting up your control room so your knocking up sheets and data entry are set for postal vote data and to speak to non-postal voters

VS10 – Userguide GTV – Three Stages of the GTV Cycle – Stage 2 GOTV

https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter#!/ViewArticle/328

Polling Day – setting up your control room so your knocking up sheets and data entry are set for poll day

VS10 – Userguide GTV – Three Stages of the GTV Cycle – Stage 3 Polling Day

https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter#!/ViewArticle/329

Training Sessions and Helpdesk Support

As ever, our team are available to help with the set-up of any part of your GTV operations as listed above and to offer assistance and guidance.

we will be holding two GTV specific training sessions on the following dates:

25 June 7pm – 8pm
27 June 7pm – 8pm

For details on how to register for these sessions please click the following link which has been circulated throughout the campaign via Victoria Carslake’s weekly bulletins.

https://public.conservatives.com/organisation-department/TrainingEventsList.pdf?deliveryName=DM45393

If you require help or are unsure of something please contact us on 020 7984 8000 or helpdesk@conservatives.com

Advanced Target Audiences – when you wish to identify two groups of people in one audience

We have received the above question during this election period and so wanted to ensure people understood how the advanced audiences’ work.

The two tiles you can use to create your own custom audiences are labelled:

• Advanced Target Audience by Electoral Area
• Advanced Target Audience by Polling District

Both audiences allow you to choose your own criteria, but are set up in different ways. The polling district option allows you to select your area in the tradition manner whereas the electoral area simply requires you to type the name of the area.

If you have more than 55 polling districts in your constituency we recommend running your audience by electoral area.

When you reach the include/exclude section of the audience you will need to carefully select your criteria and to do this you simply select from the following options:

• Include constituents who have
• Exclude constituents who have

You can add multiple options for both.

But this is where the question has arisen, what if I want to identify one group of electors and a separate group of electors in one audience?

What we mean by this is what if you wanted all of your strong conservative pledges but separately wanted to include anyone, regardless of voting intention, who had a telephone number.

The way you accomplish this is covered in the guides, but in case you are familiar with how these audiences work but not aware of this feature – on the top light blue shaded rectangle, containing the text “From all my constituents” there is a plus symbol found at the far right.

If you hover over the plus symbol with your cursor it will say “Add new include group” and will allow you to create a separate branch to your audience to instruct VoteSource to identify a separate group of electors into the total sum of your audience.

The below user guides cover setting up advanced audiences in more detail.

VS 10 – Target Audience – How to create an Advanced Target by Electoral Area https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter#!/ViewArticle/255

VS 10 – Target Audience – How to create an Advanced Target by Polling District https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter#!/ViewArticle/256

As ever, the Helpdesk is ready to assist if you have queries on any of the above. Please do contact us on 020 7984 8000 or helpdesk@conservatives.com if you have any questions.

Insight

The Insight team have been working hard to put together GTV targeting packages for you to use on polling day. Click here for more information.

GOTV - Turnout
Do you need persuading to vote Conservative? Do you need reminding to vote on 4th July?

Well, despite the challenges we face in this General Election, there are thousands of people like you in every constituency. In an ideal world we’d have enough time and enough people to have two or three conversations with all our supporters over the last week of the campaign. But in many places we just don’t have enough people.

That’s why the Turnout audience contains people who are likely to vote Conservative IF they vote. But they’re people with patchy voting records or – if we don’t have marked register data for them, people who have a middling likelihood of voting in General Elections.

So, time spent speaking to them increases the number of votes we get. Remembering that if we speak to people like us – who always vote, and always vote Conservative, or people who have told us during the campaign they’re still rock solid supporters – we spend lots of time getting ZERO extra votes!

GOTV – Turnout 1 / 2 / 3

The CCHQ Insights team have combined the data originally used to create the Solid Conservative and TVA audiences on VoteSource and canvassing carried out and entered by thousands of volunteers since 22nd May 2024 to update propensity scores predicting someone’s likelihood to vote Conservative on 4thJuly. (With all those individuals canvassed as a strong C over the past two years, and during the campaign, being given a score of 100%).

We’ve also looked at marked register data and new data from marked research carried out during the campaign, where we ask voters to state their ‘likelihood to vote’, to update different voters’ likelihood to turnout and vote this time. Both these models are used to segment the ‘turnout’ audience into three groups.

GOTV 1 – People who have been canvassed as solid Cs recently or, if they’re uncanvassed are VERY HIGHLY likely to vote Conservative if they vote – BUT who don’t always vote regularly or have a low to middling likelihood to vote. But they’re the people who data and evidence suggest are likely to vote if they’re spoken to in the days leading up to the election! So, there’s loads of extra votes to be gained for our efforts.

GOTV 2 – People who are HIGHLY likely to vote Conservative, and have a middling to high likelihood to vote. So there are lots of extra votes to be gained too, but not quite as many as in GOTV1.

GOTV 3 – People who are REASONABLY to HIGHLY likely to vote Conservative, but who have a very high likelihood to vote. And people who are VERY HIGHLY likely to vote Conservative and VERY HIGHLY likely to vote. So in these group there are fewer additional votes to be gained, but they should still be included in GOTV audiences if you have enough volunteers – but if you have to prioritise phone calls, posted letters or doorstep conversations over the final few days of the campaign, we’d recommend focussing on GOTV1 and GOTV2 over GOTV3. Especially given our need to ….. squeeze

GOTV – Reform Squeeze

It’ll be no surprise to any readers of this guide, that continuing our efforts to communicate with and have conversations with ‘TVA4’ voters is going to be crucial - right through to close of polls. Many of these voters will be former Conservatives, who have historically high voting records. But some others will be people who switched to us at the last election, having previously had quite patchy or infrequent voting histories. And – our research says that many people considering a vote for Reform are also saying they may not vote. They’ll never vote Labour or Liberal Democrat in the main, so we have to squeeze them back into voting for us – and turn many of them out to vote too.

GOTV - Persuasion GOTV

Persuasion Audience is people who are very likely to vote in this General Election – and who are likely to be considering a vote for us, even if they’re leaning towards our opponent.

In other words, we need to persuade them to vote for us. These will have been the focus of much of our campaign so far. But with so many ‘soft’ voters still uncertain how they’ll vote – it’s important we keep up efforts to win them over right through to close of polls. And especially over the final 7/10 days of the campaign.

These are the kinds of people canvassed as Probable Conservative, Labour waverers (who are likely to vote Labour but considering a vote for us), Liberal Democrat waverers (who are likely to vote Lib Dem but considering a vote for us) and people who are undecided who they’ll vote for but are considering a vote for us. Canvassing done during this campaign has been used to create these target audiences – so they’re people whose votes are up for grabs right now!

BUT, in case you’re worried about turning out opposition supporters don’t be! For the GOTV – Persuasion targets CCHQ only includes people who are almost certain to vote. We use marked register data to filter people out who don’t always vote. And we only include people who we don’t have marked data for if they’re highly likely to be ‘always’ voters. So there is little risk of turning out opponents as they’re going to vote anyway.

But we might be able to change their vote to us – if we talk about the choice they face and the issues that matter to them. So there is no risk of helping our opponents – but there’s the chance to get TWO extra votes. One more for us, one fewer for our opponents.

So, yes there’s lots to think about. And decisions to make about prioritising and planning your GOTV activities. And this time, GOTV certainly ain’t just about pledges.