New Liberal Democrat Technology blog launched

Welcome to the Technology Blog!

Over the next year (and beyond) the Liberal Democrats are on a mission to overhaul our campaigning & membership technology, tools and data to make it easier for your to campaign and grow our party.

We’ve spent the last 18 months, reviewing our data, technology and tools. We’ve also been gathering feedback from the people who use them to help us understand where the problems are at the moment.

That process has identified a number of problems with our current setup, including:

• We aren’t getting value for money from our campaigning technology
• Our data quality is low and it is scattered across multiple systems
• Our websites are expensive, hard to maintain and out of date
• We can’t give volunteers easy and high-quality information on how their teams are doing and their campaigns are going
• Our tools aren’t easy for activists to use

I think there’d be few Liberal Democrat activists out there who disagreed with that list of big picture issues – so hopefully we’ve got the measure of the problems we need to solve.

Of course, solving those problems will take time and patience: there are no overnight magic wand fixes that will solve everything (sorry!).

Fixing these problems will mean replacing some of our tools and overhauling others. 

The first improvement we're going to make is to our websites. We've taken the decision to end our contract with Nationbuilder and provide a new website solution for the Liberal Democrats which is more flexible and easy to use and provides better value through better integration with our other systems and tools.

It’ll mean a lot of improvements on how we handle data. We’ll also need to make sure that we’re providing you with the best training and support we can to get you off to a flying start.

We’re also hoping to make these changes in a much more open and collaborative way than has traditionally been the case.

Part of that is this Blog. The Technology Blog is going to be your go-to resource for updates, news and information about what we’re doing.

We’re planning to post (roughly) weekly updates on progress and give you the inside track on the project, our progress and where we’ve hit roadblocks.

You can also sign up to get (slightly less frequent) updates by email. You can sign up for those updates here.

We’re planning to regularly ask for feedback from you on what we’re doing and planning – so that we can make sure that we’re making the right decisions.

And of course, there’ll be regular webinars where we can show you more of what we’re working on and give you the chance to ask questions.

We hope that sounds useful! Please take a few minutes to take a look around the blog and make sure that you sign up for email updates!