The political technologists building the future of campaigning

We spoke to Campaign Lab for a special edition of UCL Policy Lab magazine. Sign up for their newsletter here to find out more about Policy Lab and get the latest news events.

Heading into the Campaign Lab for the first time you will probably expect to meet a group of tech evangelists. The kind of people who can tell you how to analyse your campaign’s results with some extraordinarily clever combination of open source software but who have never had to manage grumpy or stressed out volunteers who need every email printed out or help resetting their passwords. If so, you couldn’t be more wrong. 

Hannah O’Rourke and Ed Saperia are on a mission to provide some clear thinking about how and when technology can help community and political campaigning, and when it gets in the way.

The pair set up the Campaign Lab, now one of the most celebrated resources for campaigners of all kinds in the UK, to provide a space for campaigners to identify common challenges and work out how to solve them.

“We started out running monthly hackathons,” O’Rourke says. They invited data scientists, activists, campaign organisers and political researchers to come together and do whatever they wanted. 

“We started off being very non-directional,” she says. The events were a success, and generated a community of people keen to share skills and approaches and learn from each other. 

In response to a demand from volunteers for a little more help and direction, they started running ‘campaign confession’ events. 

“We got campaigners to talk through their problems with technology. We looked at these questions and asked: is there a tech solution to these challenges, or actually is there another solution? Because sometimes people jump straight to tech, when the best solution might be something like a really well-written guide or a smoother workflow.” They now run monthly hack days and biweekly hack nights in which community members continue their projects.

The question at the heart of the Campaign Lab’s work is: what does it mean, exactly, for democratic campaigners to make the most of technology? They also look at all manner of related questions. With artificial intelligence developing so fast, what new kinds of campaigns are possible this week that weren’t last week and what does that mean for our democracy? How should campaigners think about which of their challenges are best solved with technology at all? And how should they avoid the kind of AI-powered disasters that could discredit not just their campaign, but also our public life more generally?

Their initiative is grounded in a wider argument. In their analysis, two big waves of change have made these questions more urgent than ever. The first concerns the bonds that connect us. “There’s been a collapse in the traditional political coalitions that held strong through most of the twentieth century, particularly post Brexit,” she says. She also points to the shift from a core political divide based on economic divisions to one based on cultural divisions. The result, she argues, is an unstable politics with a greater need to think about different ways to campaign.

The second is technological. “The way people discuss politics has changed,” O’Rourke says. Beyond hashtags and the traditional social media platforms, she points to the amount of local organising happening online, particularly on Facebook. “For political parties, posting a video in a Facebook group can be like making a speech to tens of thousands of people in one go,” she says.

Jack Blumenau, Associate Professor in Political Science and Quantitative Research Methods at UCL, echoes the point that technology can be used for ever more granular messaging and targeted polling “One of the most profound changes in modern political polling is the ability of campaigns and parties to experimentally test the effectiveness of different messages,” he says. “Thanks to low-cost online polling samples, and innovations in statistical models for assessing the persuasiveness of different messages on different subpopulations, campaigners can develop bespoke messages for different audiences. Similarly, new polling methods in recent years have helped to dramatically improve our understanding of public opinion, particularly when it comes to understanding how political opinions vary across different types of voters or voters in different places. To the extent that politicians are receptive to that information, these methods also have the potential to strengthen representation and accountability in politics.”

O’Rourke and Saperia’s is a hopeful analysis, nonetheless. Where others might see widespread disillusionment with politics, O’Rourke and Saperia see a country in which people have moved on to different forms of engagement and are just waiting for politics to catch up. They argue that people do still care about politics, they just want to see what it can do for them, and want it to be communicated in a modern way.

O’Rourke says that the two most successful campaigns she’s been involved in were both outside of traditional campaigning. One involved gathering workers from a sector with no formal labour organisation into one WhatsApp group so that whenever one of them gets a new work contract, they can check it together. They also set up an anonymous shared spreadsheet to record what people are being paid and compare it, giving them information that makes it easier to ask for higher wages.

Another arose during the pandemic, when examination boards used an algorithm to standardise estimated exam results, leading to some state school students’ results being downgraded and university places denied. “I went from a not great state school to Oxford University,” she says, “and I realised that if I’d been subjected to this algorithm I probably wouldn't have got my offer.” With a friend in a similar situation, O’Rourke started #honourtheoffer, wrote an open letter to all Oxford colleges calling on them to honour the offers they had made to the students affected, and found a Cambridge alumnus to organise a similar letter to Cambridge. They gathered about 8000 signatures and created a league table of which colleges were honouring their offers, awarding them medals. “We managed to get pretty much all the colleges to honour the offers either this year or the next. We did that in about a week.”

She argues that people often think of campaigning as a big undertaking, but when you understand how platforms work, people can do anything. “The more you can show people that they have agency, suddenly it’s empowering. People see how they can build power together."

The founders of the Campaign Lab are, however, mindful of the dangers that come with artificial intelligence. At one of their recent events, somebody made the point eloquently by hacking together a powerful misinformation tool. Type in any given political opinion, and it would find relevant YouTube videos and leave automated comments in English supporting it. Tools like this are the next information challenge around elections, and the Campaign Lab sees itself as playing a role in helping civic society stay aware of the challenges.

Ultimately, O’Rourke and Saperia think that technology will be central to repairing the relationship between the Labour Party and communities. “Showing up in online spaces and talking about what you’re doing is a really important part of rebuilding that trust. People are starting to understand that,” O’Rourke says. “It’s a big challenge. I hope that the next generation of MPs are up for it.”

We spoke to Campaign Lab for a special edition of UCL Policy Lab magazine. Sign up for their newsletter here to find out more about Policy Lab and get the latest news events.