Introduction

The Liberal Democrat Party appointed Being as their digital partner moving towards the 2010 General Election and beyond. We have delivered and co-ordinated a range of digital media marketing communications including: a central website, content management system, leader and deputy leader websites, multiple sign-up and donation forms, search engine marketing strategy, e-mail/sms marketing and social media integration.

Project Objectives

Increasingly frustrated with their web presence and digital marketing the LibDems sought a digital company who could deliver on the following objectives:

• To create an online brand that reflected their core communications messages moving into the next decade – change for real, change for good
• To convey ‘Ambitious and Straight Talking’ – create an engaging digital presence that conveys the sense that the party sees things clearly because they’re not one of the old establishment parties
• To define audience segments and create relevant compelling experiences with heightened Call To Actions for progressing visitors in the user ‘lifecycle’
• To reach and grow audience segments by co-ordinating a range of digital media communications including websites, SEO, e-marketing and social media
• To deliver a Content Management System and e-marketing toolkit that allows them easy control of online content and messaging both at central and constituency(local) level
• To establish and manage a new robust, hosting platform to deal with the traffic peaks surrounding key political events

Strategic Approach

At the start of 2009 running up to the EU elections in June the LibDems realised they had not yet grasped the opportunities to reach and acquire new voters digitally throughout the UK. Recent elections such as the US presidential campaign had shown how the web can make a real difference to harnessing the power of communities and networks online to deliver real change.

Not only did the party lack a cohesive online strategy, the central website, their main communications asset, was poorly built and lacked a robust platform to cope with high visitor numbers. In such a critical period for the party, the strategy centred on gearing up the Libdem site and then a series of digital assets ahead of a general election.

Mechanics

Appointed in May 09 Being’s first task was to create an ‘interim’ site that could meet visitor demands during the period up to the EU Elections in June ’09. The existing site could not cope with as little as 5,000 daily visitors resulting in site crashes and prolonged downtime.

The interim site built in .NET was successful coping with 18,000 visitors on the day of the actual elections.

The new ‘change for real, change for good’ site was planned and delivered in October 09. The resulting site had a very robust technical platform with high levels of scalability and extensibility that now meets the typical demand of 30,000+ visitors a day rising to 100,000 in the days before the election.

Being also project managed a number of key stakeholders to plan for the online customer experience. Through a series of Being led workshops the user ‘lifecycle’ was defined to identify key audiences and planned the website architecture and content accordingly.

Deep analytics of the user and their characteristics were considered. The website vision was to progressively interact with each user type over a ‘lifecycle’ to encourage increasing engagement with the party and its policies.

The aim was to build brand loyalty via the steps below:

• Uninformed to the informed
• Informed to the engaged
• Engaged to a supporter
• Supporter to a volunteer
• Volunteer to a member

Clear ‘Call To Actions’ on the homepage and key landing pages targeted these key audiences.

Being also planned and delivered other online activities, such as, on how users could be ‘driven’ to the site, what the experience would be when they got there, and the e-CRM dialogue that would ensue.

Social media integration also played a significant role in allowing community groups to build a voice and engage with the party. You Tube, Facebook and a Ning based community site have been integrated, building on the power and advocacy of social networks.
An extensive email marketing campaign was devised utilising our proprietary email marketing toolkit; Etelligent, sending up to 1 million emails per month.

And to make the most of the ‘personalities’ in the party, Nick Clegg and Vince Cable microsites have been established to build upon the growing public empathy toward the party as a whole.

Homepage

Email marketing campaigns

Evaluation & Results

Measurement of strategic and tactical objectives are ongoing with further considerations being given on ‘fine-tuning’ improvements to enhance results further in this critical period.

1. Improved Site robustness (Ref: objective 6)

   Each request for a web page can be broken down into four stages:

   • DNS resolution
   • Connection to server
   • First Byte Received
   • All Content Transferred

   The speed at which a request was resolved on the new site went from 8.741 secs and 0.194 secs.
   

   KPI	13.3.09 - 13.4.09	13.3.10 - 13.4.10
   DNS Resolution	0.011 secs	0.074 secs
   Connection to server	0.017 secs	0.021 secs
   First Byte recieved	8.628 secs	0.027 secs
   All content transeferred	0.085 secs	0.072 secs
   Total	8.741 secs	0.194 secs

2. High User Lifecycle Performance, Reach and Engagement (Ref : objective 3, 4 and 5)

   KPI	13.3.09 - 13.4.09	13.3.10 - 13.4.10
   Uninformed to the informed	37,000 new visitors	220,142 new visitors
   Informed to the engaged	2.48 mins av. time spent (incl wait time) 28,117 ret. visitors	3.5 mins av. time spent 109,260 return visitors
   Engaged to a supporter	2,393	5,098
   Supporter to a volunteer	61	8,816
   Volunteer to a member	37	138

3. Controlled Messaging and online content (Ref; objective 6 and 7)

   When ranked against a range of government websites by Sitemorse, the independent industry ombudsman on website accessibility standards, functionality, code quality and user journey testing, of the three major political parties’ websites, only that of the Liberal Democrats made it into the top 50. Additionally, its website was the most improved in terms of accessibility and performance, rising from 333rd place last quarter to 37th this quarter. Overall, the Conservative Party’s website ranked 187th ahead of Labour’s, which ranked 385th.

4. Creating an engaging digital presence online (Ref; objective 1 and 2)

   Webcredible, the independent research reporting agency which examined the user-friendliness of the websites of 10 parties that hold seats in the House of Commons, rated the Lib Dems' digital presence a top-ranking 80 out of 100.

   The report which stated that the Liberal Democrats have the most user-friendly website: including understanding of why they should vote for a party and getting information on party leaders or key party figures, also reported The Conservatives in second place with 67 points, and Labour 5th with 48 points.