How should I organise my time during the campaign period?

That depends on how much time you have got to dedicate to campaigning. A lot of candidates will still be working during the campaign period, and will be trying to juggle family responsibilities as well – it’s a lot!

I think you need a blend of face-to-face contact with voters and virtual campaigning (answering emails, being active on social media, responding to media enquiries – activities which reach a broader audience, but with less of a human connection). If you don’t have a lot of time to spare, then door-knocking is probably not much of a realistic option, but you can still manage face-to-face contact by going along to hustings, or even by standing in a public place with a banner identifying you as a candidate, and talking to people as they pass by.

Be careful with social media – it can really draw you in, and you can find you’re spending a lot of time on there, but only actually talking to a small pool of people. Be reasonably strict with yourself about how much time you’re going to give to social media, and how much time to answering emails and other virtual campaign activities.

Where you don’t have control over the timing of an event (hustings or presentations, for example) do get those in your diary nice and early.

Aside from that, I think it helps to have a plan for how you’re going to spend your time during the week ahead. You probably don’t want to plan much more than a week at a time, because it’s a really intense period and you want to give yourself enough flexibility to respond as things change! A plan isn’t a promise – don’t beat yourself up if you don’t stick to schedule – but it helps you to think through how much time you want to give to different campaign activities, and to make sure you’re balancing your time sensibly.

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What other campaign materials might I need?

If you want to reach as many voters as possible, you might need to engage with them in a variety of different ways. These are some of the things you might want to think about.

Do you want to use the materials provided by the States? If so, you will need:

  • Content for a two-page manifesto (in one of five possible templates)
  • A script or outline for a 3-minute video, and
  • Content for a candidate page on the Elections website

There is more information about how to prepare for each of these in the official candidates’ guide, towards the end of the document.

Do you want somewhere candidates can find out more about you? If so, you might want:

  • A separate personal manifesto (online-only, or printed)
  • A personal website

Do you want to drop something through people’s letterboxes, or have something to hand to people you meet face-to-face? If so, that could be:

  • A separate personal manifesto (as above)
  • A postcard or calling card, telling people where they can find out more about you

Do you want to connect with people on social media? If so, you might want to set up accounts on:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Youtube
  • or any other platform you’re comfortable with

Do you want a variety of ways of connecting with people online? If so, you might consider:

  • A personal website (as above)
  • A blog
  • Graphics with your key messages – you can post these on social media
  • Audio recordings
  • Videos
  • Livestream events

Do you want anything visual? If so, how about:

  • Posters (think about where these might be displayed, and how big they’d need to be)
  • Banners (if you’re arranging a face-to-face event, for example)
  • Something more creative?

There are probably plenty of other things I have forgotten about, but hopefully this is a good core of campaign materials to get you thinking. You won’t use all of these – some of them are more costly and time-consuming than others, for little gain in terms of impact, so if you have a limited budget, don’t try to do all of this! Focus on a few things, do them well, and take advantage of every free opportunity (media supplements, hustings and face-to-face events, and so on) to raise your profile.

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How do I write something people will read?

I wish I knew!

I try to write in everyday language, and to avoid technical terms if there’s a simpler alternative. Normally, it doesn’t sound condescending, just conversational.

When it comes to your manifesto, you’re going to have a lot to say, in a very small space. Keep it short. Don’t make people wade through paragraphs of fluff to get to your point – if they’ve got a hundred manifestos to read, they might just not bother with yours.

You can break text up with bullet points and internal headings. You can put key words and phrases in bold text, but have a good look at how that appears on the page – sometimes it works well, and sometimes it looks silly.

I find it helpful to use questions as sub-headings (as you can probably tell!). It is a good way of telling people upfront what the purpose of your paragraph is, and drawing them in to the answer. That might not be a great format for a manifesto – if I remember rightly, it’s been tried before and didn’t go down too well – but it might be helpful for your website.

If you have time, you might want to run your writing past a couple of friends, and ask for their impressions. You don’t have to change everything they suggest – it’s your writing, after all – but it might be helpful to have a sense-check before releasing it into the wild!

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How do I make my manifesto accessible to everyone?

Start by making it a priority. This means that you will consciously think about accessibility in all you do. You might not get it perfect, but you’ll do a much better job than candidates who aren’t even considering it.

There is some information on making your campaign accessible in the official candidates’ guide (pages 20-21), together with links to more information. Local charity Access For All* has some great guidance on making accessible websites, printed material and videos.

If you are using social media, there may be ways to make your account more accessible for disabled voters – for example, by writing captions for pictures you post, so visually-impaired people can enjoy them too.

You might be able to find information about improving accessibility under your Account Settings or somewhere obvious, or you might have to google your social media platform + “accessibility” to find it! (The irony of making accessibility information obscure is not lost on me…)

The benefit of searching the internet for social media accessibility tips, instead of being able to find it easily on the platform itself, is that you will probably also come across information from disabled social media users* explaining what works well for them. Read this and learn from it, as much as you can.

What I did on my manifesto and my website – which mostly boils down to clean presentation, large font size, and writing in plain English to the best of my ability – was really all I did in terms of accessibility. There is a lot more that you can do if you want to. I didn’t use videos as part of my campaign, but if you are doing video or audio clips online, do try and make sure there’s a transcript or subtitles available for people who need them.

One thing I wanted to do, but lacked the confidence to, was to write a one-page easy read version of my manifesto, which could have been tucked inside the main document, for the benefit of people with learning disabilities, people with dementia, and anyone else who found the longer manifesto difficult to make sense of. It’ll be different this time – you probably won’t be producing a separate manifesto anyway – but I’ve mentioned it because I regretted not doing it, and you might want to do better.

Finally, apart from Lilita Kruze, who stood in the last Election, there have been very few candidates who’ve been able to communicate with voters here whose first language is something other than English. But if you’ve got a couple of key messages, what about making them available in different languages on your website? It might not be easy to get a reliable translation at short notice (please don’t use an online translation tool!), so this might not be feasible, but it’s another angle to think about if you are considering how best to make your campaign accessible to everyone.

~

* I mentioned that you might be able to get advice on accessibility from voluntary groups, and from people who share their expertise on social media. Although this is freely available, if you find it useful (and if you can afford to do so), you might want to consider making a donation (in the case of individuals, take a look at whether they have a patreon account or similar) by way of thanks. These are uncertain economic times for everyone, and little courtesies can make a difference.

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If I’m a party member, how might that affect my campaign?

There are two dimensions to this question.

One is technical: there is a set of rules which apply to parties and party members. These are not quite the same as the rules for independent candidates, and you’ll need to learn your way around them. I’ll come to that in a moment.

The other is personal: if you join a party, what are you signing up to? Is it a shared manifesto, a set of policies or principles, or something else which all party members hold in common?

Whatever it is, it is likely to have some effect on what you choose to include in your campaign. Depending on how your party is structured, it may have some rules about what you must say, and perhaps also what you cannot say.

There might be internal rules about vetting manifestos, or providing consistent answers to questions from voters. All that depends on what you agreed to when you signed up to the party.

But if there are more constraints, there might also be more freedom. If, for example, you know that there is going to be a central party manifesto which deals with a number of key issues, perhaps that frees up more space for you to concentrate on the issues that matter most to you, in your own manifesto.

Parties might bring new campaigning opportunities, as well – parties might, for example, organise their own “meet the candidate” events or hustings, which might draw a different crowd of voters to those you would reach on your own. All of this is stuff you need to discuss within your party, so that each of you can decide how best to run your own campaign.

On the technical side, the spending rules are slightly different if you are in a party. Again, the official candidates’ guide is your best reference for this. Essentially, your party has no spending rights unless you, as its members, choose to give it some. You can transfer part of your own spending allowance – this means you will spend less, and the party can spend what you have allocated to it. That’s added together with transfers from other party members to make the party’s total spending limit, which is an absolute maximum of £9,000. You don’t have to transfer actual money to the party, just the right to spend it.

It’s complicated! The candidates’ guide explains it far better than I do. If you and your party officers are unsure about any part of the rules, you can contact the Elections team with queries.

There are specific rules about parties, and how they should be registered, and how they should conduct themselves. Your party officers need to learn their way around those rules; I won’t be unpacking them here. (A party structure is supposed to provide some of the support that independents don’t have, so I’m not going to duplicate its work!)

For individual party members, it’s just worth remembering that any financial support you receive from the party still needs to be consistent with the Election spending rules, and that you are still responsible for recording and submitting your own election expenses, whether or not you are a party member.

Finally, when you submit your nomination form, you will be asked to declare if you are affiliated to a party, and to give the name of a party if so. There is also space on the States manifesto template (see pages 42-46 of the guide) to include a party logo if you want to. So if you’re thinking of joining a party, you’ll want to have made a decision before the nomination period opens!

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What do I need to know about Election spending?

You need to feel confident that you understand the rules about campaign spending before you submit your nomination. If you are found to have deliberately broken the rules, there are serious penalties in the law – you could face a hefty fine, and you could even lose your seat. So you need to know what’s expected of you.

Please bear in mind that Guernsey has its own laws which govern how elections are carried out. So if you’ve been involved in politics in another country before, please don’t assume that it’s the same here.

The best place to start is the official candidates’ guide on the Election website. Pages 12 to 18 explain the rules about Election spending.

Remember, every candidate will need to submit a statement of Election expenses at the end of the campaign period, whether you have been elected or not.

This means you need to keep track of the cost of everything you use as part of your campaign, and keep hold of receipts to prove it. It is much better to do this as you go along than to try and pull everything together at the end.

Part of the reason it’s important to keep track of expenses is because there is an upper limit on how much you can spend. For ordinary candidates, that limit is £6,000 (if you’ve got it!). The rules are more complex if you are a member of a party – again, please refer to the official guide to get it right.

You should remember that things have a value, even if you don’t pay for them! Our laws refer to this as “money’s worth”. You might not actually hand over cash for some of the things you use for your election campaign, but you need to account for them in your expenses as if you had paid for them.

If someone wants to help you out with election expenses, you need to check the rules on donations – some kinds of donation aren’t allowed, and you will need to refuse or return them. Other kinds need to be declared, so that your Election finances are transparent.

Finally, the States provides some assistance with election expenses. You are entitled to a two-page manifesto in the combined manifesto booklet (which will be delivered to all registered households); a three-minute video; and a dedicated candidate page on the Election website. You are also entitled to reclaim a grant of up to £500 towards your election expenses – but bear in mind that you can only do this at the end of the process. This assistance is available to all candidates, regardless of whether or not you are elected.

These are some key points you might want to think about when planning your Election spending, but they are only part of the story. I would stress, again, that you need to read the official guidance. If you think anything I have said here conflicts with the guidance, then – obviously – trust the guidance! (And please let me know, so I can make a correction. I don’t want to mislead anyone.)

If you have read the guidance (and the laws – especially the Reform Law and the Electoral Expenditure Ordinance) and you are still unsure about something, your first port of call should be the Elections team. If you can’t find the answer on the Elections website, then get in touch with them, and I am sure they will do their best to help.

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When should I start preparing?

Now.

Literally, right now.

I am writing this on August 14th. That means, three weeks from now, the nomination period will have closed. Everyone who wants to stand for election will already have thrown their hat in the ring. There will be a month to go until votes are cast.

What if you haven’t made up your mind yet? Then act ‘as if’ you were standing. It will be far easier to get to the start of September, having done all your preparation, to decide to walk away – than it will be to get to the start of September, decide that actually you do want to stand, and frantically have to do weeks’ worth of work over a couple of sleepless nights.

If you haven’t seen the States in action before, there is still time – we are sitting from 18-21 August and again from 25-28 August, assuming we don’t finish our agenda in the first week. We usually sit from 9.30-12.30 and again from 14.30-17.30 each day of our meeting. You can come and sit in the public gallery of the Royal Court at any time while the States Meeting is going on. (And you can leave at any time too – you don’t have to commit to the whole session!)

It is worth seeing the States in action as a parliament, although that’s only a small fraction of what we do – a lot more happens in Committees, and I will try and shine some light on that in later blog posts.

You will also want to research key issues, and take time to think about your own position on them. You might want to talk to existing States Members to get a more personal insight (you’re always welcome to get in touch with me if you’d like a chat, and I know many of my colleagues would say the same). And you might want to find out more about the Parties that are forming, and decide if you are interested in joining any of them.

And then you’ll want to decide what campaign materials you’d like – will you just use the States manifesto, or will you have a personal one too? What about posters or leaflets? Do you want a website? What social media accounts will you use – if any? Will you be doing video or audio recordings? You need to start thinking about how you will source those materials, and getting the content organised.

There’s a lot to do. As a general rule of thumb, the earlier you can start preparing, the better. I’m the kind of person who needs a deadline, so I’m not terribly good at obeying that rule of thumb – but even I started writing my manifesto in earnest at least a month before nominations opened. The closer the campaign period gets, the harder it will be to do justice to your preparation – so, honestly, there is no time like the present.

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