I ended my summary post with the question “how did the party websites become so universally dull?” It’s easy to leave a question floating, much more dangerous to attempt to answer it. Below, I lay out my thoughts not as a polished prescription, but as a conversation starter for the parties.

As we aproach a general election and I open a political party website, it can be a little like sitting next to a stranger on a long train journey. I might be lucky enough to find someone interesting and engaging, who is up for a stimulating conversation. If it goes really well, maybe we’ll exchange contact details, have a few drinks, and a beautiful friendship is born out of a chance encounter. Alternatively, I might get the latent drunk – peacefuly asleep until the very last minute, when he suddenly starts shouting meaningless babble over my head at no-one in particular.

Political party website content generally takes one of three forms. First is rolling news and comment – press releases, and web news stories. Second  is information on campaigns and policies. Finally, information on conferences, and things like resources for activists – content for the internal audience.

Given that there will be a heavy supporter bias in the visitors to any political party site, rolling news well done is an opportunity to keep activists and supporters engaged and motivated. A balance is required between news and comment on the issues of the day, and news and comment on the party itself. This latter group of content – information about the people in HQ, the process stories, candidate selections, has a significant, and I would argue growing,  pulling power. However, parties are too keen to push this news to infrequently produced paper newsletters, or to Home sites.

Many party sites – Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens being the worst offenders – lead instead with a lazy rehash of the daily line to take. This approach to content  can alienate supporters and create a sense of detachment from party leaderships and their troops on the ground – party activists are often the last to believe the party line. Immediately, these websites begin to talk over the heads of their users. Credibility and interest is lost.

Campaigns are the principle opportunity to reach out beyond the traditional supporter base by rallying ad-hoc support around specific issues.

The Right:  5/5

Both the BNP and the Conservatives scored 5/5 in my content tests.

The BNP have a very active news centre, a sort of righter-wing online Daily Mail, which incorporates news from HQ and around the regions. There are high numbers of comments under each news story. Although written in the style of media releases / reportage, the stories appear to be principally generated with the BNP-supporting web audience in mind.

The BNP appear to have successfully placed rolling news updates at the heart of their web content, and have an internal structure which delivers regional news to the national site. I cannot see any evidence of a print newsletter for BNP members, making the website the key channel for delivery of internal party news.

The Conservatives provide online content through blogs, news, speeches, and campaigns. Particularly of note is the high quality campaigns page, though this feels rather buried in the design of the site.

The Conservatives make heavy use of a regular stream of video (see elsewhere for more), and content provided for press releases is different to the content used in the higher profile online news section.

The parties of the left have proven slower to react to the need for a steady stream of online content, and the power of the web in gaining and motivating support.  These parties need to engage in some frantic effort to prepare themselves for next year’s general election.

Video

Video helps to bring a party website to life – it is a way to sharply and succinctly emotionalise or editorialise a complex issue. A good party website will have a steady stream of video produced, with a call to action included in each video. These need not necessarily be big-budget blockbusters, and a slight home-made feel can be a positive benefit.

I’m going to make a vaguely educated guess that a large portion of political party website traffic comes from people sat in offices. Be they newsrooms of international news companies, or the desks of party activists slogging away at the day job.

Users based in offices can face fundamental obstacles -  their computer may not have working sound support, or they may not wish to be overheard in their office watching a party’s videos. How do you get round this? You might add subtitles, or  create a video which leads on words and pictures, rather than talking heads.

Compare and contrast two recent attempts at the animation route. First Labour:

and then the Conservatives:

The Tory video is produced to a much higher standard. For a start, it’s got a script, not an extract from a press release. Unlike Labour, the music has a connection to the on-screen message, there is narrative use of colour and typefaces, and there is a clear and coherent message – it tells a story. However, the Conservative video is not perfect – the call to action at the end of the video has a more opaque purpose than Labour’s, and their custom player strips out all of the social capabilities of a system like YouTube – thousands may have watched, hundreds may think the content is five-star, but we’ll never know.

What to do?

If any political party is still indulging itself in debating the question of whether the 2010 election will be ‘the internet election’, then they have fatally underestimated the power of online.

Here then, is my starter for ten:

Properly resource your web teams, and either integrate them into, or place them on equal footing with, your press office during the election period. Guido Fawkes can hurt you as badly as George Pascoe-Watson, and without the overnight lead time of the first editions to prepare your reaction. The public will start commenting immediately – how quickly, how effectively, and where, will you rebut?

Open up your sites so that party workers / activists / supporters can provide you with content. Look at the success of your respective Home sites, and seek to emulate their content, rather than their functionality. Give user generated content equal prominence to the party line – create a buzz, show us your supporter base. You’ll have to filter it, of course, because your opponents are bastards and they would hijack an open stream without hesitating. You need to face in and out of your party simultaneously.

If you’re an elected representative, don’t staff it out. Get on to Twitter, Facebook, and the your party’s website yourself. Don’t see online as a luxury – start by using it as an effective channel for motivating your activists. If you’re in a party HQ, make sure your candidates have guidance on what not to do.

More video please. Tell us the story of the campaign trail. Buy a load of Flip Ultras and despatch them to your key marginals. Provide guidance so the teams on the ground promote the video locally, but pull that video back up so we can see the national picture from your site.

Yes, use your site as a portal for donations and new joiners, but go to the effort to convince us you’re worth joining before pushing a big red ‘JOIN‘ button in our faces.

Talk to us, not at us. Listen to your audience, and respond. If you don’t have someone manning your ‘corporate’ Twitter feed who is authorised to issue replies on behalf of the party, you’ve failed already.  If that prospect is too terrifying, you could consider a Twitter ambassador. Hold online Q&As. Let us comment on your news and policies. Respond quickly, and thoroughly – even to the loonies. Especially to the loonies.

Finally, if you are the person or team charged with running your party’s website, ask yourself one question whenever you upload or approve content – “is this dull?” If it is, send it back. You’ll be doing us all a favour.

Over the past few weeks I have been studying the websites of the big British political parties. Generally ignoring their presence on social networking sites, or any microsites, I have examined the effectiveness of their core website – I wanted to know how serious each of the parties is about using their home on the ‘net to reach out to their key audiences. Political party websites receive relatively low levels of traffic, which is one of the reasons why the parties find it important to get out there on to the wider ‘net – if during your lunchbreak you quickly surf Facebook, perhaps a news website, or your email, you would probably never dream of including a political party in that list.

So the parties need to get out there and grab your attention wherever you are. Back at home however, the party’s own sites may get low traffic, but the visitors are generally high value. They include:

• The media
• Party activists / PPCs / staff / potential members of staff
• Existing and potential voters (including members and supporters)
• Political stakeholders (eg Electoral Commission)

These audiences are served through the provision of:

• Excellent content. Party narrative / messages (including rich media, eg video)
• Media releases and statements
• Means to join / support the party financially or through email
• A database of candidates (and local / regional parties, outside of election time)
• Policy information
• Means to contact / interact with the party

I used nine tests to examine how well the parties are serving their audiences, and these are the results…

The best political party website in Britain

Relative to the rest of the field, the Conservatives come out as the clear winner, nearly 20% ahead of their nearest competitor.  This is well deserved and no surprise, as it is by far the most fully resourced of the sites. Perhaps more surprising is that the nearest competitor is the BNP – and that the Labour party come bottom of the pile. The Liberal Democrats are beaten by both the BNP and UKIP.

British political parties are still falling behind the efforts of some other parties internationally – the obvious comparison is with Barack Obama’s MyBO campaign community, but other smaller parties abroad are also discovering the power of supporter communities ahead of their UK counterparts. South Africa’s Democratic Alliance is using free software to engage supporters, and I am grateful to Mark Pack for pointing out to me that the Green Party of Canada are using full-blown free ‘customer relationship management’ software for voter ID and activist engagement.

Strengths

Taking the field as a whole, the party websites are effective at communicating their policies in writing, and to varying degrees they serve their press and media audience well. When it comes to listing local candidates, again the sites generally do OK – with the notable exception of the BNP who appear to have chosen to keep their candidate list secret.

Weaknesses

All of the parties fail to provide regular opportunities to engage with key party figures through the site – this is a real failing of the political party websites, and the sooner the parties are able to sort themselves out and open themselves up to discussions with the public, the better it will be for all of us. Political party representatives are consciously choosing to avoid technologies which would bring them closer to those who elected them / would elect them to power, and that should be unacceptable to us.

There is one notable exception in the shape of David Cameron’s Cameron Direct, but even this is simply traditional town hall meetings, filmed – there are no opportunities to put questions online.

Content is king

‘Content is king’ may be a simple mantra, but it’s one some of the parties are failing to understand. Curiously, the best providers of online content are the Conservatives and the BNP – the resources of one dwarf the other. One chooses to invest serious sums of money in technology, design, and staff salaries on their website because they can. The other invests huge amounts of time on its website because when it comes to communication channels, it’s almost all it has.

The other parties are generally failing to ensure a steady stream of content is written specifically for their websites – there is a direct connection between this, and the fact those sites are generally dull and unengaging. The absense of killer content to engage key audiences undermines the effectiveness of a site almost more than any other measure in my test.

Visuals

I didn’t attempt to score the sites on how they look, but visual identity is an important party of the party’s overall ‘brand’ impression on voters.

The Conservative party have developed a slick integrated brand identity for all media (including web), and the Labour party have a smart typically ‘web 2.0′ style website. The Green party have developed a contemporary integrated look and feel which applies across their regional sites as well as the main site. All three tick the graphics box. By comparison, the visual identity of libdems.org.uk is amateurish. The BNP’s online visual identity, while more current than the Liberal Democrats, might best be described as functional. While UKIP have taken big steps forward recently, there is still something of the garden-shed amateur to their site.

Community is the X-Factor

My short study leads me to conclude that if a political party wants to be distinctive online, community is the X-Factor. Political parties, through cautious management and slow reactions to changing trends, have effectively ceded the management of powerful large groups of supporters to their respective ‘home’ sites such as Conservative Home, Labour List, and Liberal Democrat Voice. The buzz around each party is to be found on these sites, and there is often little cross-over between the party sites, and the party-supporting sites.

Take two contrasting examples. The Conservative’s Blue Blog has been a failure. The only posts to attract a reasonable body of comments are those by the party leader. Posts which attract one or two informed comments generally see those comments go unanswered – it seems clear to the visitor that the Blue Blog is little more than a top-down, non-interactive repository for the sort of local newspaper articles which political interns churn out all the time.

On the other hand, the BNP’s website is a roaring community and comments success. The BNP have chosen to build their home site in to the main party website, before anyone needed to build it outside of party HQ. In doing so they have taken on a significant risk in the event of a serious party schism or rebellion against their leadership, but for the meantime they appear to have the most active political party website in the country – something which is reflected in the fact that their visitor levels match or exceed that of the much larger Conservative party.

Conclusions

Political parties still don’t get the Internet – perhaps not through ignorance, but because they are choosing through caution or lack of resources to try and keep voters and other key audiences at arms length online. The average voter, touring the political party websites, is given the impression that politics is happening somewhere ‘out there’, over their heads. No political party website feels welcoming to their key audiences – supporters, potential supporters, or the media. It begs the question – who do these websites think they’re talking to? How did they become so universally dull?

Over the next few weeks I’ll be publishing a stream of posts which go in to each of the nine tests, and pitch the sites against each other – it is in many ways a personal report card from me to the parties – and no-one got an A.

Other posts in this series:

• How the results were calculated
• How the party websites rank globally

Not all of the measures were equal. After the scores had been weighted, the final score for each party was multiplied to give an overall percentage score for the party. The full results are available here.

The criteria for inclusion used the most recent election to inform the choice – any British political party which elected one or more MEPs to the European Parliament in June was included. In order to keep the scope of the project manageable, I have looked in each case at the ‘main’ cross-Britain party website, and not Welsh/English national sites.

The nine measures were:

• A1 Visibly widely updated within the last week
  • This test examined the home page, and the major section home pages for date stamps / other evidence of an update within the last three days. 5 points were awarded for extensive updates beyond the homepage, down to 0 for no update in last three days / no way of telling if updates are contemporary or not.
  • Weight: 0.7
• A2 Prominent opportunities to interact with key party figures
  • Here I was looking for opportunities for the public to directly talk to senior / recognisable party figures, through blogs, email, forums, twitter etc. 5 points were awarded for sites where there was evidence of regular dialogue between site visitors and the key party figures.
  • Weight: 0.5
• A3 Regular stream of content written specifically for web
  • This test examined whether parties were taking time to produce content which would interest and engage their supporters and voters. Parties relying on the steady stream of media comments released by their press office to act as the main content base were marked down.
  • Weight: 1
• A4 Easily accessible policy information
  • Sites got top marks for making available both a quick and easy digest of key policies, backed up by easy to access detailed policy documents. Sites offering only one or the other were marked down.
  • Weight: 1
• A5 Opportunities for supporters to engage
  • Here I am looking for evidence of open, public dialogue between a party and its supporters, as well as opportunities for supporters to engage in policy making, attend events etc. Effectively what I am examining here is whether a particular site gives supporters of the party a feeling of welcome, and an opportunity to influence their party’s operations and thinking – in a nutshell, does this site motivate supporters to carry on? And do visitors to the site get to see this happening, so that they might feel inspired to join a pre-existing community?
  • Weight: 0.7
• A6 Regularly updated web-specific video
  • Well-made video is an increasingly important part of political party websites. Here we are looking at both the production quality of the available videos, but also giving top marks to sites which have an evident steady stream of videos, which might tempt users of their site back in the future.
  • Weight: 0.8
• A7 Press office info and media releases easy to access
  • The media in all its forms (bloggers included) is a key user of political party websites – here we are looking for an easy to access stream of media releases, and also for easy to find contact details for the party’s press office.
  • Weight: 1
• A8 Easy to join up / support
  • This test assessed how easy it was to find and operate the online joining forms for the parties, and how easy it is to sign up as a non-paying supporter (eg by signing up a mailing list). Ease of use was a key factor in this field.
  • Weight: 1
• A9 Local candidate / party info fully completed and easy to find
  • This test used four postcodes – one in each of Suffolk, London, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Fife. In ech case I was looking for a postcode search which generated specific information about the local candidate in the next general election. Parties were not penalised if they had not yet selected their candidate.
  • Weight: 1