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August, recess in Westminster, school holidays, often a quiet time in the world of digital campaigning. Some campaigns are entirely Out of Office this time of year, so don’t expect a reply to your emails or much activity in your inbox. This begs the question for those of us online and at work though, what should you do with the downtime?
The main thought I had as I reflected on my own time on different campaigns and how we made the most of the August quiet, was: tackle your back-end processes.
Well I’ve put together a little list of ideas from my own experiences, hope you find them helpful:
1. Look at your campaign management and ops processes
When I was at 38 Degrees, we used quieter months to create a better system for categorising and tagging campaigns.
While campaigning, we sent tens of thousands of user emails, so we built a system with categories like Economy, Climate Change, and Justice, and sub-categories like NHS and Policing. It started as a manual operation, but it allowed us to improve segmentation and send more targeted communications. We could split emails based on campaign interest, to make sure the messaging was relevant and engaging.
2. Check-in with your clients
At Movement, things don’t really follow the same cycle. But we continue this approach, using any gaps to clean up code or consolidate databases.
We recently gathered client feedback to see where we could make quality of life improvements like faster upload processes and better analytics delivery. We tracked feature usage, identified pain points, and worked on areas that were underutilised, improving the overall platform experience.
We also updated our UI recently, partly because of a re-brand but it was also an opportunity to think about the experience of using the platform and what parts were intuitive to the user and what weren’t.
3. Build new internal tools
After the hype of elections we know how quiet it gets with everyone taking well deserved rest. The 2015 UK Election wind-down created an opportunity to build in-house systems: a custom CRM and email platform with 38. Similar opportunities appeared during work with Sum of Us (now called Eko) and political campaign group GetUp in Australia, where we’d find times after campaigns and elections were the perfect opportunity to review our tech-stack and how they’d performed over the course of those campaigns. We’d run ‘Stop. Start. Continue’ meetings to work out what to cull, what to improve and where we could upgrade for the next campaign. These cycles allowed us to focus on data fundamentals, analytics segmentation, and ensuring campaigns could reach the right audiences even more effectively next time. In some ways these periods were where we did our most impactful work.
4. Don’t forget to look after yourself too
It’s easy to forget that the most important driver of any campaign are the people who power them, in other words you! Particularly during those hot summer days it can be worth using the slowness to check in on yourself. Many are on holiday for a reason, especially after a long campaign or working across serious, grueling causes, take a moment to recharge your batteries.
If you’d like to hear more about what I’m up to, follow me on Linkedin or Bluesky.
