In the 2005 General Election the minor parties scored 6% of the vote in the Norwich North consistuency. After a febrile summer in Westminster politics their share of the vote rose to 28% in the recent by-election, and they could be ready to steal a march online too.

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

Results

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: