Inside Labour’s digital campaign: five lessons for nonprofits
I’ve just come off five very intense - but very rewarding - weeks working on the SMS programme for Labour’s general election campaign. This is now the third Labour election campaign I’ve worked on over the last decade, and, from my vantage point, this was the most well run of the lot. That’s certainly the case for digital - my colleagues in Labour’s digital teams ran arguably the best online election campaign ever by a UK political party, particularly on social media.
Working on an election campaign is like nothing else. The pace is frenetic. While it’s exciting, it’s also exhausting. It’s not a way any organisation could, or at least should, run long term. But in my experience, the contrast to how nonprofits typically operate provides a useful mirror through which to evaluate our own ways of working - particularly when it comes to digital.
So, here are five lessons for nonprofit digital programmes from what I saw on the election campaign:
1. Digital content needs to be channel-native, even if it feels risky
When I joined the Labour digital team in 2015, I walked into the middle of a long-running debate over message discipline vs. getting traction online. In 2024, Labour’s leadership recognised that those two things do not need to be in conflict.
For example; there are many ways to tell voters not to be complacent that Labour will win, and each works for different audiences. One route is to go on the Today programme and explain why the polls are wrong; another is to make a video of a screaming nightmare robot rabbit waking up in bed next to Jacob Rees Mogg.1
Digital teams were given freedom to make channel-native content and it cut through brilliantly. Without a doubt, some of this content could be perceived as risky. That’s all the more pertinent when you remember that this was not a party running a risk-heavy campaign; much has been made of Labour’s supposed “Ming vase” strategy to minimise any avenues of attack by the Tories.
But, as 38 Degrees CEO Matthew McGregor excellently puts it, when it came to digital messaging, “[there was] a level of understanding at the very top that risk aversion isn’t safety, it can be actively damaging.”
Nonprofits can learn from this by:
expanding our message frames so that they work on each of the channels we communicate through
giving the keys to those channels to people who live and breathe them and know how to make content that works
empowering those individuals to make decisions, experiment and take a few risks
2. Digital needs a voice in senior decision making
Digital being empowered in this way doesn’t happen by accident. Labour’s Digital Director has been a member of the senior leadership team since Keir Starmer was elected leader in 2020.
As I often say on this blog, creating the conditions for good digital work doesn’t just mean giving people the right tech. You also need to bring in people with the right skills, and build them digital-friendly cultures, processes, theories of change and messaging strategies. And it’s very hard to do that if digital doesn’t have a voice in the highest level of decision making.
The lesson here for nonprofits is straightforward: every single nonprofit needs digital experts on their board and senior leadership team. And it’s worth bearing in mind that digital isn’t a monolith; leadership teams need expertise in digital marketing as well as data and digital infrastructure.
3. Digital thrives under fast, devolved decision making
The ability to move quickly is vital in an election campaign. When you’ve only got 6 weeks to run, delaying getting something out the door by even a day can cause problems.
It’s revealing what that time pressure does to the way organisations communicate. Suddenly, each meeting is focused solely on problem solving and decision making. Calls rarely last more than 10 - 15 minutes. There’s no time for deliberation by committee or to wait for leaders to feed in on everything, so decision making is devolved - with individuals given absolute clarity on their areas of responsibility and what decisions they can and can’t make.
This also facilitates lightning fast decision making and sign off. The SMS team that I worked in would often go from drafting a message to it being signed off within 10 minutes. Decision makers saw unblocking colleagues as a crucial part of their role, and made sure they were accessible to do it. Even on occasions when sign off was needed directly from Keir Starmer’s team, this typically happened the same day.
4. Letting people work without friction opens the door for innovation
Of course, that level of speed isn’t desirable for every kind of decision over the long term; for one, it closes off valuable space for consultation with different groups within an organisation. But, for most day-to-day operational decisions, this kind of rapid decision making should be achievable for the vast majority of organisations.
And it was clear to me, as it has been in previous election campaigns, that the quality of decisions did not suffer from being made quickly by a small number of junior or mid-level staffers. The opposite, in fact; the lack of friction allowed people’s ingenuity and can-do attitude to flourish. Innovative thinking flows from a sense of possibility; there’s nothing better calibrated to dampen enthusiasm for trying something new than the prospect of a month-long sign off process.
5. And a tactical one…we can be doing a lot more on SMS and WhatsApp
For this election, I worked in a team delivering Labour’s SMS programme to members and supporters. Using the Movement platform, we turned SMS into our primary volunteer mobilisation channel, recruiting thousands of new volunteers to campaign on polling day. SMS has some characteristics that make it particularly well suited to this role:
almost all of your audience see your messages, which makes it perfect for rapid response moments (e.g. Labour put out a very successful fundraising SMS the moment the election was called)
you can use it hold 1:1 conversations, which is useful for handholding people over the barrier of going online to offline
people can take action by replying directly to the message, which is quick and easy to do
Despite these strengths, SMS hasn’t yet had widespread use amongst nonprofits in the UK, although it’s much more common in the US. Similarly under-explored is WhatsApp’s business API, which offers the potential for SMS-style 1:1 interaction with supporters at scale, but with access to rich content like images and video.
Utilising WhatsApp effectively is only going to become more important for charities, given the widely-reported changes in social media habits over the last few years (in short: more conversations in private messaging groups like WhatsApp, less on the big public platforms like Meta and X). Alongside the business API, working out how best to use the new-ish Communities functionality is part of this. For example, at Labour, another team used the WhatsApp Communities functionality to build “digital door knocking” groups that pushed out content for members to forward to friends and family.
The aftermath of this election will be a moment of reflection and change for the third sector. For what is effectively the first time in the social media era, we have a progressive government in power. We’ll need to think differently about how we use digital to drive change - and we could do worse than looking to Labour itself for lessons on how to bring some of that campaign effectiveness into our digital programmes.
After-thought: speed, innovation and autonomy
If you apply a cultural lens to the lessons I’ve shared above, three core traits come through: speed, innovation and autonomy. This isn’t a coincidence; each of these enables and reinforces the others.
I often speak to leaders who highlight the lack of one of these traits as a key problem in their team’s culture. Some feel it takes too long to get anything done; others are struggling to drive innovation; others describe teams that don’t show initiative or own their goals.
Solving those problems often means not starting with the trait itself, but instead building up the cultural pillars you need to support it. Want more innovation? To do that, we need to first empower staff and take friction out of their daily work. Want things to go faster? First we need to help people feel genuine ownership over their work and come up with better ways of doing things.
These kinds of cultural shifts don't happen overnight, but they're crucial for building the agility that underpins any outstanding digital programme.
Look, if that’s not what it is, I’m sorry, but I’m old now and spend all my time changing nappies - you can’t expect me to understand these memes any more