How Labour won the 2024 UK general election with Movement’s SMS, email, and phone banking tools
[Image: Kevin Coombs/Reuters]
In the run-up to the 2024 UK general election, the Labour Party faced the challenge of reaching and mobilising a large number of supporters in a short amount of time. Surprising many, the then prime minister Rishi Sunak had announced the general election sooner than expected. With six weeks to get out and win, Labour turned to Movement’s SMS, email, and phone banking tools to implement their campaign strategy. This case study explores how Labour leveraged these tools to drive voter engagement, raise funds, mobilise volunteers and ultimately secure victory in the election.
Challenges
Before adopting Movement’s tools, if Labour's mobilisation team wanted to send SMS to supporters they had to manually export data from their CRM, import it into another system, and then send messages in batches, limiting them to around 7,000 SMS segments per day. As the team planned their 2024 election campaign it was clear that they needed a much more nimble, efficient and powerful system which could work to far greater scales and much shorter time limits.
Solution
Labour decided to partner with Movement due to its scalable and integrated platform that could connect with their CRM,handle complex segmentation and send at high volumes. This integration enabled Labour to execute comprehensive campaigns using SMS, email and phone banking, improving their ability to reach voters and supporters quickly and effectively.
Key features used:
High-volume SMS campaigns: Movement’s platform allowed Labour to send large volumes of SMS messages rapidly, essential for time-sensitive communications during the campaign. This included sending one way “Blasts” and having tens of thousands of SMS conversations.
Integrated communication channels: The ability to integrate SMS, email, and phone banking provided a cohesive strategy for engaging with supporters across multiple touchpoints.
Flexibility: Movement’s development team was responsive to Labour’s needs, implementing features like A/B testing mid-campaign and improving functionalities based on feedback.
Customisation: Labour built complex user-flows with ease. This was particularly helpful in onboarding volunteers via SMS, so that these volunteers could use Movement’s phone banking to ring voters on polling day.
Implementation and results
Fundraising success:
One of the standout successes of Labour’s campaign was their use of SMS for fundraising. Before this election campaign Labour had never raised significant funds through SMS. Within minutes of the election being announced, Labour sent an urgent SMS blast urging supporters to donate, resulting in over £100,000 in contributions within an hour. SMS fundraising became a key part of the fundraising programme. This demonstrated the power of SMS to capture immediate attention and drive action, significantly outperforming traditional email fundraising efforts.
Volunteer mobilisation:
Labour utilised Movement’s tools to craft dynamic and engaging supporter journeys. The team employed a data-science approach to segment their audience based on their likelihood to volunteer or donate. They used data-science to guide their efforts, starting with a phone-bank focused effort. However, rapid experimentation determined that SMS conversations were far more effective and efficient. As a result, SMS conversations became the primary method to engage potential volunteers, sending personalised messages from key figures within the party to encourage participation. Phone calls were still used, but only if SMS had failed to get a response. This approach resulted in significant increases in getting the right volunteers to the right place at the right time in the campaign.
Polling day strategy:
On polling day, Labour executed a highly effective SMS campaign, sending out urgent messages like "Do not share: 100 seats look too close to call, it's five hours out, volunteer now." This message alone created the largest spike in volunteer sign-ups Labour had seen throughout the campaign, proving SMS to be a crucial tool for real-time mobilisation.
Zoom Webinars sign-ups:
In addition to traditional campaign methods, Labour innovated to find the most effective way to “build the bridge” from online engagement, to offline activities. They found it was highly effective to use SMS and email to direct people to large Zoom webinars to energise supporters and provide last-minute updates. These webinars featured prominent figures such as Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner and were instrumental in rallying support and commitment from thousands of volunteers across the country.
SMS triaging
Movement gets all of your comms tools working together. Labour were able to send out SMS messages to large numbers of people, then use their responses to inform their phone banking campaign. Doing this warmed up large numbers of people before calling them. This boosted their turnout campaign and converted more people to Labour voters. It was so successful in fact, that they diverted more people on to the phones to support it.
Lessons Learned
SMS effectiveness: SMS was most effective in situations requiring immediate attention and response, particularly for fundraising and urgent mobilisation efforts.
Importance of integration: The integration of multiple communication channels allowed for a unified strategy, enhancing the campaign’s overall effectiveness.
Need for adaptability: The campaign benefited from Movement’s flexibility, allowing Labour to adapt their strategies quickly based on real-time feedback and results.
Hear it from Labour
The project lead and the party's advisor on innovation, Johnny Chatterton told us that “The beauty of Movement is it’s built for humans and is designed to encourage innovation.”
Giving an example of how Movement was used across numerous channels to engage their following Johnny explained that:
Using Movement “started off as a very simple journey of sending people an invite to an event that weekend. However, as we experimented we found that people were far more likely to get involved if we started a conversation with them, so we built a large scale SMS conversation programme, with up to 50 people chatting with our members and supporters over tens of thousands of conversations. If they didn't respond, we’d call them. If we called them and didn't get through, we’d do an email automation to let them know why we called them and what we're trying to get them to do.
In the very final days, we looked for ways to bring our members behind the scenes, so invited them to briefings with the General Secretary and shadow ministers. People loved being invited, and then were very responsive when on the call we asked them to make plans to help out in the final sprint of the campaign. None of these innovations would have been possible under our old system. ”
Conclusion
By leveraging Movement's SMS, email, and phone banking tools, the Labour Party transformed their campaign strategy, effectively engaging supporters and driving significant results. This partnership was instrumental in securing Labour's victory in the 2024 UK general election, demonstrating the power of Movement’s modern digital tools in political campaigning.
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