Win Elections with TYPO3
The Liberal Democrats were founded in 1988 as the successor to the Liberal Party, the oldest political party in the UK. The Liberal Democrats had been the third party of UK politics through until 2015, when they lost many seats.
In 2024 at the General Election they won 72 seats, more than they have ever held, and are now very clearly the third party in the UK Parliament again.
The Liberal Democrats are a federated political organisation, with the Federal party incorporating 3 state parties, each of those regional parties, and each of those local parties, plus a range of other associated organisations representing particular interests and areas.
It is a membership organisation at heart with up to 100,000 members, but without substantial state funding of political parties in the UK its operations depend on donations from individuals and the work of volunteers across the country.
Specification
The Party defined the purpose of their sites needing to:
- Engage users to sign a petition, sign up for news, sign up for an event, volunteer, become a member / supporter
- Generate revenue for the party through donations and membership
- The source of information for the Liberal Democrats including latest news, campaigns, events, people, party, training, policies, jobs and manifesto
- Membership self-service including renewal and updating account details (feature not currently available on Federal site)
- Provide a way for users to get in touch with the party
In addition they required commonality of design and functionality across its sites, and ensure strong standards compliance, data security, honest cookie consent and website accessibility across the country. In Wales, legislation there require bilingual sites, and as a part of the UK, support for that bilinguality on the Welsh sites and indeed all sites in Wales was critical.
Further, the Party had two core datasets – a voter id database provided by NGP Van and membership database in Salesforce. There was a determination that all website data and transactions should flow to and from those databases, rather than retain another layer, as predecessor websites had, leaving unreconciled and often unmanageable data silos.
Finally, the Party isn’t wealthy, and needed an affordable solution across hundreds of sites, and that didn’t increase with the number of users, but could support massive peaks in visitors around election times, when traffic increases by a factor over peacetime traffic.
“Fleet has been essential for our successes, including our best election result for a century.”
Mark Pack, Lib Dem Party President 2020-2024
The Solution
The Party selected Prater Raines as its developer, with decades of experience in working with the Party and its data systems: Tim Prater first worked on the Party core membership database in 1993 and Prater Raines had been supplying sites to various parts of the Party from 2002.
Prater Raines proposed TYPO3 as the basis for the new cross party platform. Typo3 is open source, and was selected after a long look at all available options to offer a fast, scalable, supportable and secure website environment for the Liberal Democrat family of sites.
TYPO3 makes it easy for user at all levels to manage websites at their level, be it the Federal site with dedicated professional web managers, or local level where managers are almost always volunteers, and regularly inexperienced website managers.
Prater Raines have created a series of custom blocks designed to use the global look and feel of the service, but ensure its simple to add blocks such as Calls to Action, support buttons, petition forms and more. Similarly although the news plugin is “off the shelf” it has then been customised to meet the organisational need, removing fields and options that are going to go unused.
In addition, Prater Raines built integrations to use data from, and push data to the Party’s existing data systems via middleware supported by the Party themselves. Petition and volunteer data gathered on the websites doesn’t make use of Typo’s built in form functionality but is instead passed to the Party where it is data-matched with the existing records and pushed to the NGP-VAN Connect system within minutes, allowing campaigners to access and use that information within minutes. Donations and membership sign-ups are similarly pushed to the Party where they are data matched and recorded in Salesforce and also reporting to local organisations within minutes.
Organisational data also travels in the other direction: site managers and key local organisation data is set centrally and recorded in Salesforce, but flows within minutes to allow access to administrators to update sites (or remove access). Petition questions and datafields set up in Connect to respond to local campaigns are reviewed and available within the corresponding local sites to allow petitions to be set up and the data flow to be set up in real time.
Launching the Fleet
Christened “Fleet”, the Federal website went live on Typo3 in December 2022, and Local Party sites started migration to the platform in January 2023.
The service, hosted across three servers in multiple locations and running Gluster and Galera to sync content, now hosts over 320 sites including the Federal site. It was up and responsive throughout the July 2024 General Election despite a huge spike in traffic (a multiple above that in the May 2024 local elections, which was itself a factor higher than general usage).
Gallery
