Campaign Lab

Campaign Lab
Building the case for an evidence-based approach to campaigning
What is Campaign Lab?

Thousands of activists across the UK volunteer their time and energy for campaigns every year. Year in, year out, we use the same campaigning methods and tools we always have, because we think they work.

But as technology changes how we work and live, it will also change how we campaign!

We are a community of politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and campaigners who are working together to develop innovative election tools and improve the way we analyse and understand campaigning.
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Labour Conference

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New advances in machine learning are reshaping our society at a rapid pace. The past year, since the launch of Open AI’s Chat GPT3, have seen a massive leap in quality and scale of applications made possible by large language models. In this dynamic era of technology, understanding how AI can shape and enhance campaigns is crucial for any modern campaigner. Over the next year we'll be working on looking at how AI will shape campaigning.

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What are we doing?

Growing a community
Campaign Lab brings together campaigners, developers and data scientists from across the progressive spectrum in regular Hack Days and Hack Nights. We're working to build a network of people committed to a new culture of campaign innovation and experimentation.
Researching how AI will impact Campaigning
AI is transforming how we live and work. We are interested in exploring how this is likely to affect campaigning both in elections and more broadly. We'll be maintaining a crowdsourced Handbook on AI & Campaigning, Running trainings for organisations looking to use these new tools and looking at what tools could be built for campaigners.
Running campaign experiments
We are creating a Library of Campaign Experiments. This involves both running experiments (RCTs & A/B Tests), conducting innovative research and summarising the findings of academic papers in a way that makes them more accessible. Get in touch if you are interested in running an experiment! hannah@campaignlab.uk
Building tools to help progressives win elections
For campaigners the story of politics and technology has often been a fraught one. Tools are often difficult to use or not built with the user in mind. We invite campaign organisers from across the UK to join us and share their problems and work with our volunteer technologists to help solve them. See some of what we've built here.
Analysing Election Results
We're building models to better understand election results and identify where results bucked the national political and demographic trends. These are areas in which local campaigning may have actually made a difference and where we can start learning and testing.
About Campaign Lab
Campaign Lab started in May 2018 off the back of a discussion at Newspeak House noting how strange it is that political parties undertake few if any retroactive analyses of campaigning strategies and methods.

Thousands of activists across the UK volunteer their time and energy for electoral campaigns every year. Year in, year out, we use the same campaigning methods and tools we always have, because we think they work. But there has never been any contemporary analysis or studies undertaken to assess the impact or value of electoral campaigning methods in the UK.

We think this is pretty important. If you'd like to help, consider joining one of our events and pitching in. If you think you can help in other ways, whether you'd like to partner with us, provide data or consider helping fund this work please get in touch at hannah@campaignlab.uk

This is a taster of what we've achieved so far...

600
Participants
32
HackDays/Nights
13
Projects
558
Beigels and pizzas and salads consumed
Organisers

Hannah O' Rourke
@hannah_o_rourke
Hannah is a political campaigner and active member of the Labour Party. With a background in political project management, she is passionate about building networks to make politics more open, collaborative and future focused.
James Moulding
@jamesforthemany
James is a political technologist with a background in technology startups and political activism, he is focused on improving the capacity of the British left to both debate and deploy technology.
Supported by

https://nwspk.com
Newspeak House
Newspeak House is an independent residential college founded to nurture, study and inspire emerging communities of practice in UK public sector and civil society.