Embedded Election Tech Team

General elections are times of chaos, high drama and hope. Though unsuccessful, Momentum launched the largest electoral organising campaign in UK history during the 2019 General Election.

We provided a three person product team that embedded within their organisation in the last two weeks of the campaign: a product owner/developer, a developer and a designer.

The demands of an election campaign are to build technology rapidly and get it in front of thousands of people. Sometimes work is briefed on the day of deployment.

We hoped to bring an atmosphere of calm to the situation, adopting a thoughtful and professional attitude even when things get tough.

We built three separate products from Momentum:

• MyCampaignMap - their flagship volunteer mobilsing platform. Mobilising thousands of canvasses to take action.
• MyPlanToWin - a personal campaign planning tool. Make the habit of campaigning. Beautiful design, gaming logics.
• MyPollingDay - a tool for the most crucial moment of the campaign, the Get Out The Vote. MyPollingDay allowed users to book coaches to get out the vote in key marginal seats.

In addition we provided general digital advice, and recruited and trained up a swarm of technical volunteers to help out.

The election wasn't a success. To think deeply about why we completed a review of the groundgame and technology for the Labour Together 2019 General Election Review . We contributed to the writing and editing of the text among a large group of stakeholders.

Our two supplementary annexes give more detail.

In lieu of strategy: ground operations and organisational structure details the Labour groundgame and how difficulties in internal communication, strategy and organisational structure led to the defeat. System updates required: ground operations and digital technology examined the core party technical systems and their relationship to the ground campaign and often found them lacking in the Labour Party central operation. This was a no blame and systematic analysis.