By Chris Thorne, Shelter, Supporter Mobilisation Officer
I trailed PostBug – an online platform that makes it really simple to send postcards and letters to decision makers – with a Shelter campaign at the end of 2017, and wanted to share how it went…
We needed to get legislation passed to ensure all hope were fit for human habitation, but the government hadn't introduced one. We had the support of some MPs, and they could introduce a Private Members Bill. But Private Members Bills are designed to fail; there’s limited parliamentary time to debate them, and debates take place on a Friday, when MPs are likely to be in their constituency.
They’re also extremely vulnerable to being talked out and blocked by MPs who either don’t agree with the proposed legislation, or are against the whole concept of Private Members Bills in general. Previous iterations of the Fitness Bill have been stopped this way.
Support the Fitness for Human Habitation Private Members Bill, so that it passes its second reading. The Bill will make private and social rented homes safer, by giving renters the right to take their landlord to court over unsafe conditions in their home.
But Private Members Bills are designed to fail; there’s limited parliamentary time to debate them, and debates take place on a Friday, when MPs are likely to be in their constituency.
They’re also extremely vulnerable to being talked out and blocked by MPs who either don’t agree with the proposed legislation, or are against the whole concept of Private Members Bills in general. Previous iterations of the Fitness Bill have been stopped this way.
It’s possible to prevent a Bill being blocked by getting 100 supportive MPs to attend the debate and vote on a closing motion to pass it. So we needed to get at least 100 MPs to go to the second reading on the 19th January in order to be certain that the Bill would pass.
We needed to mobilise our supporters to pressure their MPs to attend. But didn’t want to use a standard tactic of getting supporters to email their MPs. We know that MPs get fed up of this, and aren’t keen on getting their inbox regularly flooded. And we felt that supporters would tire of it, since we’d used similar actions earlier in the year.
So, when I saw an opportunity to trial PostBug – I jumped at the chance! Real postcards may stand more chance of getting noticed, and the tool made it very simple for supporters to send them.
In December we asked our supporters to send save-the-date postcards to their MPs. It was the ideal action to trial this tactic – as ‘Save the date’ is a concise, simple message which lends itself to a card.
We first emailed our most active supporters and had such a good response, we then emailed less active supporters. Just like an "email your MP" action, supporters clicked a link to an unbranded "post your MP" page where they had a chance to personalise the message and simply had to enter their postcode, email address and name. The cards were remotely printed and posted within minutes and we knew who had sent cards.
After Christmas, our supporters tweeted MPs, to hold them publicly accountable for attending. They also called and emailed them, and our Public Affairs team engaged with MPs too. And of course, Karen Buck MP, who proposed the Bill, did an awful lot of lobbying…
The Fitness for Human Habitation Bill passed its second reading! A closing vote was not needed, but there were 100 supportive MPs there just in case. Shelter’s campaign was also praised during the debate, by MPs of both main parties.
We received positive feedback from MPs, supporters and the sector about the save-the-date cards.
PostBug support was incredible! They were extremely responsive, and realistic and honest about what could be achieved by our campaign launch date. There were a few initial technical problems, but they managed to iron these out, so no major issues were picked up on by supporters or MPs.
The printed cards also look and feel great!
Users would benefit from a test environment to run end-to-end tests of the sending process (I had to rely on sending tests to myself & a friendly MP), and a dashboard with a live view of where cards are in the printing process though. [Editors note: this feedback was acted upon and is available]
Overall, I would highly recommend using PostBug. Feel free to contact me if you’d like to know more about my experience of working with them, or just the campaign in general.
Chris Thorne
Shelter
Shelter invited MPs via postcard to 'save the date'
