The Yes Campaign – What lessons need to be learned

The author Andy May was the National Manager of the Regional Staff for the Yes Campaign and formerly National Organiser of Take Back Parliament.

This is written for some of the thousands of people who worked their hearts out for thecampaign.

The first ever national UK referendum on our voting system was always going to be a difficultaffair. It may be that we were never in a position to win once the Conservatives and a significantpart of the Labour parliamentary party mobilised against us. But the size of the loss cannot justbe attributed to the political environment we were in. Those who ran the Yes campaign musttake a long hard look at themselves.Before looking at the problems, I want to start on a positive note. Having been involved indemocratic reform 18 months, I can say that from when I started some great things have beenachieved. Even after the loss of AV, constitutional change is still on the agenda with Lords reformlikely to happen within this parliament. The Take Back Parliament rallies just over a year ago gaveus the media exposure we needed to renew interest in democratic reform. There is now anational activist network with many passionate and hard working volunteers who want tocontinue despite a big setback.There were at the peak about 150 local groups and I hope many will continue and grow and begiven the support they need. During the referendum the ground campaign also managed to buildup the closest equivalent that has probably ever been seen to a political party machine created bya non-party campaign. And we did this in less than nine months. This was only possible through asuperb network of regional staff, from all parties and non-aligned backgrounds who bonded andworked together across party lines. Let’s not forget that 6,152,000 people voted for change eventhough it was a compromise choice for a limited type of electoral reform where the instigator,Nick Clegg, was hugely unpopular with the public.Whatever the positives, I have to say in many ways the past months have been incrediblyfrustrating for myself and a number of other staff who felt they can’t speak out. Other postmortems I have seen, likethis one,have been rightly critical and those of us who worked on thecampaign owe it to the volunteers and donors to allow a public inquest in to what went wrong.My view is fairly critical. From the very start the self interest of the major funders and the seniormanagement’s lack of creativity, lack of experience and inability to listen to staff and activists’concerns had a very negative impact on the chances of success.These are just some of the contributing factors.

Staffing:

One thing which probably both campaigns suffered from was a lack of experience of referenda given this country hasn’t had one for 35 years. However we also even lacked staff withexperience in basic political campaigning – although some certainly stepped up to the plate anddid some outstanding work this cost us. The most experienced people in the campaign were oftenthe regional organisers – who had up to 20-30 years experience from Labour or the Lib Dems insome cases. At HQ there were just a couple of people who had any deeper experience than

running a constituency campaign – yet had hugely important roles with national influence. UnlikeNo2AV who drafted in a number of experienced staffers as the campaign developed we neverreally addressed this. Our Director John Sharkey is ultimately responsible for both these choicesand many of the other problems listed in the bullet points below. He failed to lead from the frontand failed to listen to or consult his staff at the middle and lower levels

Phone Banks:

The phone bank strategy yielded somewhere in the region of 500,000 contacts when3 million had been originally projected. I do not have the overall complete cost of this but know itwas somewhere over £600,000 or £1.20 a contact. This turned out much worse than what we werequoted for the work by a commercial company and was a huge chunk of the ground budget gone.The reasons for this were partially technology failure, partially a lack of willingness of activists to dohigh volumes of calling and also a very unrealistic target being set right at the start in terms of thenumbers of calls that could physically be made. Another major problem was that the publicawareness levels about AV and the referendum were very low so many of the early contacts madewere not Yes or Nos but ‘Don’t Knows’ which were of little use to follow up ‘Get out the Vote’ calls.

Campaign literature:

Until sometime in March 2011 the central campaign never had a coherentliterature plan for political parties. When a plan was developed not one single piece of literaturebar the polling day leaflet was produced on time.The first A4 leaflet took fiveweeks to produce (unheard of in political circles) after escalatingcomplaints from activists and regional and central staff. Most of the time regional staff did not getan opportunity to even look at the material they were supposed to be trying to sell in to localpolitical parties to delivery before it was already printed.This massively reduced the goodwill of local constituency parties. When literature did arrive it wasrushed and because many of the Regional Staff had given up on any arriving the local politicalparties (mainly Lib Dem but some Green, Labour and UKIP) had not planned literature drops intotheir own activity.

Media and comms:

At a national level we had a very experienced head of communications whohad extensive links into the lobby and some very useful relationships with newspapers in Englandand Scotland.However our media was too reactive. Every proactive idea came too late, allowing the nocampaign to tar us as the dodgy donor campaign, or the campaign that would allow BNPsupporters more votes. Either we should have got down and dirty with them or totally ignoredthem and played the moral high ground yet we fell between both stools and went into reactivemode which simply played into their hands.At a regional level our regional staff never received even the most basic of media support. Forinstance they would often receive second hand the national press releases hours after the usefulperiod had passed. For nearly the whole campaign they never received template press releases,any sort of comms grid and only really received any sort of support on regional media work untilthe final two weeks into the short campaign.

Advertising:

Whilst not involved in the advertising process I understand that the agency involved inmost of the creative work was disastrous. Not one of the creative concepts designed ever saw thelight of day despite costing the campaign tens of thousands of pounds. There has already been a

report in the Guardian about the giant pin striped bottom, but there were half a dozen more wherethat came from. It took months for even a basic concept for advertising to be agreed upon.

Fundraising:

For most of the campaign no-one in our central team below senior management levelwas told who our head of fundraising was or ever shown a fundraising strategy. When it was askedabout in a full staff meeting it became apparent there wasn’t one. The head of fundraising wasappointed not because she was a professional fundraiser but because she was on the board of trustees for one of the major funding bodies. She then subsequently charged a £500 per dayconsultancy fee and I am unclear how much money she raised. A number of other consultancyarrangements were made on the campaign at considerable cost to the war chest. This meant thingslike the Freepost and above the line advertising suffered badly from lack of funds. The Freepost wasonly sent to about 11 million households due to lack of money - yet we never had a professionalfundraiser working on the campaign to raise this money.

Polling:

A six figure sum was spent on polling and the original message testing back in August toconduct a series of polls and focus groups. This was a huge spend and no further focus grouping wasconducted until well into the short campaign when last minute focus groups were pulled together.This found that one of the key messages that the campaign had run with for months ‘a small changethat makes a big difference’ didn’t even resonate particularly well with the public. But by that pointit was too late.There are other things to add but overarching all of this are two critical points which make all of theabove less forgivable.Mistakes are always made, strategies are always changed and referendum campaigns are rare thingsso things are always likely to go wrong

. It’s not the things going wrong that we should be angryabout it’s when a chorus of voices in the campaign at various levels saying that things were notworking were repeatedly ignored.

Firstly, there were several full regional staff meetings where the staff were at the point of shoutingthat the phone banks were not working, the literature was inadequate, the messages weren’tgetting across and that the campaign was dysfunctional. Yet rather than address this and engagethese people, most of the senior staff decided not even to show up to the final regional meeting fourweeks out from the campaign. There was even a five page report, prepared by four of the RegionalStaff, which was given to the head of field ops in December about perceived failings in the campaign.This got a reaction of anger rather than a willingness to change things.Secondly, the passion to win and the hard work that should be have been self evident on a campaignof this magnitude simply wasn’t evident in all of the staff. Partly I think this was because the terribleway the campaign had been run by the Director had beaten the willingness and drive to win out of once passionate people. Whilst staff were giving up, volunteers were working their day jobs thencampaigning till their feet were sore in their spare hours, some staff barely worked 9-5 on the Yescampaign at HQ. Others took long holidays over Easter and over the royal wedding. For people on asalary in positions of national responsibility to do this in a referendum campaign is unacceptable butit was never challenged by management. Meanwhile unpaid interns in the central office wereputting in 60 hour weeks and doing an incredible job.