Running for election really does give you a different view on some things.

Until last year, I was pretty opposed to clicktivism; you know, the 38 Degrees style of campaigning where hundreds of people will send an identical email to their candidates or MPs to tell them where they stand on something.

I’d softened a bit after I chaired a Cleanweb London event on online activism, but generally I subscribed to the more traditional view that fewer well-crafted letters were a better way of doing it.

Denial of service

I’ve heard stories of other candidates who were unable to get anything done other than just emailing back to bulk messages, replying to each email individually!

Now, that may still be the case for most people in politics, but for me it’s utterly changed over the last few weeks.

I love 38 Degrees emails and the like. I love days where a campaign obviously kicks in and I get over 100 emails about TTIP, or something like that.

Many candidates will see this as spam, but not me. Why not? Because I know how to handle it. Because I can use it for what it is.

Provision of service

We’re using NationBuilder to run the campaign; it handles the website (though I hate CMSes and would be happier with Jekyll, but whatever), but most importantly it handles our contact database. All the emails we get to official addresses come into the system and get flagged for followup.

On a 38 Degrees day (as I’ve come to call them), this followup list gets pretty big and the load is unmanageable for a human.

But all the emails are useful. They give me an idea of who cares about what, and more specifically, where they live and their email address.

To build my database of potential voters, this is amazing. Suddenly I have 100 more people who I know care about certain things, whom I can email about events, updates, blog posts, etc. People who want to hear back.

Deploy the robots

So I’ve created a script that helps manage this. It’s open source, so if you want to do the same, you can.

Here’s what it does:

• Looks at all the open followups in NationBuilder, and for each one:
• Get the email text that need replying to
• Work out who the email is to, and reassign it to the right person (for campaigns that aren’t using the right addresses).
• Look for certain consistent text in the email to identify the campaign, and apply a tag.
• Find the address, and run it through Open Addresses’ Sorting Office app (which I helped write at work) to turn it into structured data. Note we don’t submit the address into Open Addresses, as even though the existence of an address isn’t personal information, it feels like it is, and I don’t want to annoy anyone.
• Set the address for the sender back into NationBuilder. This also does auto-assignment to wards, constituencies, etc.

This runs every hour using the Heroku scheduler.

There are a couple of gotchas. The NationBuilder API is great, but one thing it can’t do is get followups and email content. That made it a fair bit harder, and I have to actually drive the website (using Capybara and PhantomJS) and pretend to be a real human user in order to read the emails. It works OK, but it’s brittle and very slow.

Also, reliably extracting the address is hard and varies across campaigns. I’m hoping to improve Sorting Office itself to do this job, so I can just drop the entire email into it and get back the address only.

Back to humanity

So now, instead of a ton of emails, I have a load of tagged contacts in NationBuilder. It’s then easy to build a list of people who want to hear back on a particular subject.

At this point, I make sure I read the email properly, look at the links, and write a blog post in response.

I can then, every few hours, send a bulk email back to the senders with a quick answer, a link to detailed the blog post, details of our party and campaign, and links to things like upcoming events. The open and clickthrough rate is surprisingly good.

So, all in all, once this is up and running, handling a high-impact day of emails takes only a few clicks, and each sender gets a well-thought-out response and ways to engage further.

I have to admit, as well, that I get a certain amount of pleasure from imagining the inbox of my opponents on days like these.

Wishlist

If you’re running these bulk email campaigns, here are a few requests:

• Update your data regularly. YourNextMP is doing a sterling job of maintaining candidate lists, and contact details. Make sure you’re up to date, and make sure your email gets to the right place.
• Make sure the address is easily-parsed; well-separated from other text in a predictable way, and not shoved together with phone numbers, names etc. You could integrate Sorting Office into your own applications to help with this, if you want to be proper amazing.
• Add some sort of unique campaign identifier that people can’t change - it’ll help me tag things. Also, maybe a suggested hashtag?
• Make sure you include the originating campaign link. I get that you want it to look like it’s only written by the constituent, but honestly, on that you’re not fooling anybody. Often I actually want to share it on as well!
• If you really want to help people like me, then make all the important metadata machine-readable. I’m talking about a JSON attachment or something, containing a structured address, name, other contact details and the unique campaign ID.

If you’re NationBuilder, please let me fetch emails via the API. You don’t really want me scraping your site, after all, the overhead is huge!

And last of all, if you’re a candidate, then you’d better accept it’s time to tool up. Your voters have new opportunities to engage, and you’d better be ready to handle them. The future’s not slowing down just because you’re not ready.