The Brief
Best for Britain approached Outlandish in 2022 to help them build a tactical voting tool for the next UK General Election. The tool would need to be simple to use for the general public and for journalists, and would need to encourage as many people as possible to vote tactically in order to get the Conservatives out of government.
The Client
Best for Britain is a pressure group that generates research and data to advocate for positive change in British politics and policy. It was set up in the wake of Brexit, to try to lobby for policies that would benefit the UK. They already have some pretty technical people in their team, who have a really good grasp of the data and how it ought to be communicated clearly. So it was great working with them, because their requirements were clear and realistic, and they’d already built a prototype in WebFlow for us to improve on.
Our Solution
The user’s startpoint of the tactical voting tool is a postcode lookup field. Entering your postcode returns a page with data specific to your constituency, including a voting recommendation. We built a WordPress site to house the tool, with plenty of custom blocks that the team could use to build their static pages and arrange their content and data. The client can easily upload a csv file in the WordPress backend, which means that once we’d built the visualisations, they could keep updating their data and recommendations without input from us.
We also built a widget that could be used by third parties to embed the tool on their sites. This was used by the Mirror, which drove a lot of traffic to the site.
The Impact
We are excited to find out how the site impacts the election. What we do know is that over a million visitors used the tool in the first couple of hours after BfB launched it at a press conference. This surpassed our expectations, and crashed the site. Eek. Of course this caused a fair bit of stress, but also added to the sense of urgency and public keenness to get the Tories out of government. A lot of newspapers have covered the project, adding to Best for Britain’s reputation as a leader in the field of psephology (nice word, right?).
Going On
We love building tools like this, and we hate the Tories. So even though this tool is specific to the 2024 general election, we very much hope to build similar things in the future, with Best for Britain and others in the field.
