Read the latest blog on our projects and new developments in areas like security, WordPress and Typo3. The team at Prater Raines write how projects have progressed with challenges that have been faced. We like to keep you informed in technology and security updates.
Following this year’s review by the Boundary Commissions for England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, the next General Election will be fought on new constituencies for the first time since 2010.
Full data isn’t published by the ONS yet. But the Lib Dems use our well-loved online interface to Salesforce, Lighthouse, to manage selection processes for election candidates and need to have the new constituency data to plan for the next GE, in addition to the existing constituencies on which any by-elections before the next GE will still be fought.
In order to import the new data into Salesforce, they naturally turned to Prater Raines for our expertise in political geography and API and database design.
If you work with political geography data and Salesforce, need your own organisation structure mapped, or your online campaign would benefit from enabling supporters to email MPs based on their geographic location, get in touch.
Always good to wake up news to the news that a friend and client has had a major success, and we got that news today!
Huge congratulations to the new MP for Somerton and Frome Sarah Dyke.
Sarah’s campaign website at sarahdyke.uk was based on our Fleet service for the Liberal Democrats. Sites can be put together and launched at speed but with wide ranging functionality, with data flowing directly from website sign-ups, petition signatories and volunteer offers into the Party’s key campaigning database.
Nominet, the public benefit company that operates and protects .UK internet infrastructure, has partnered with The Institute of Coding (IoC). Together, they are launching an ambitious programme at scale to change the course of the UK’s growing digital skills shortage and pull down the barriers many face trying to enter the rapidly-evolving workforce.
Prater Raines have been accredited Nominet Channel Partners since 2007.
Nominet has committed to £12m in funding over three years to develop the Click Start programme with the IoC, led by the University of Bath. There will be opportunities for over 26,000 learners to take part in the initiative – these could be anyone from veterans looking for a career change, to underrepresented groups who are looking for an introduction to entry level tech and digital roles, to young learners looking to start their careers.
When Prater Raines took on its first batch of customers, the only smartphone was a BlackBerry, less than 200,000 UK homes had a broadband Internet connection and Pop Idol’s Gareth Gates and Will Young were dominating the charts.
We’re proud and excited to be celebrating 21 years in business this year and looking forward to many more to come.
At Prater Raines we’ve provided campaigning websites for more than 20 years. Our role as provider of choice to every Liberal Democrat local or regional party in the country means that we’ve registered over a thousand domain names.
During our recent launch of the party’s new federated website platform Fleet we noticed something unusual when we were asked to register some domains containing hyphens for new customers. We were seeing warnings that the sites might not be legitimate.
Every morning at our full-team stand-up meeting we all share what we accomplished yesterday, what we plan to work on today, and the obstacles getting in our way. I wanted a way of tracking what I’ve been working on that was unobtrusive and didn’t require big changes to the way I like to work or huge amounts of time spent on the task of time tracking itself.
The solution I found is the simplest you could come up with but I think there is awesome skill in producing an application that does everything it needs to and nothing more.
We’re delighted that our very own Tim Prater has been selected to join the Nominet Members GiveHub Panel for 2022/23.
Prater Raines have been Nominet members since 2007. Tim applied to join the panel as he has extensive experience of evaluating competing bids and prioritisation through his time as a Councillor and Charity Trustee.
The Members’ GiveHub is an opportunity for Nominet members to support an organisation of their choice.
A fund of £50k each month is available. Applications are reviewed monthly by the GiveHub panel, a group of up to seven volunteers from the membership.
Members can apply for one grant for one organisation of up to £10,000 per financial year (1st April – 31st March) or multiple grants for multiple organisations up to a total of £10,000 per financial year. Organisations that receive funding will not be eligible for further funding until the next financial year regardless of the amount awarded.
Prater Raines are delighted that we have been selected to develop “Fleet”, a complete new website platform for the Liberal Democrats.
Prater Raines have been working with the Liberal Democrats since 2002. In that time, we’ve provided up to 300 local party websites through our custom built Foci service. So building on this expertise, we’re excited to be working alongside the Liberal Democrats on Fleet, their next generation website service.
Prater Raines is an “accredited channel partner” (domain registrars and member) of Nominet, the .uk domain registry. We therefore receive regular news and updates from the industry. The most recent edition includes some interesting statistics of domain name registration growth this year. It’s clear that many businesses looked to move online at speed during the first, and second, UK Covid lockdowns.
Lib Dem Draw for 2020 is now being launched!
Back in 2018 Prater Raines were delighted to relaunch the long running Lib Dem Christmas Draw as an online draw.
The draw was run again in 2019 (despite much of the draw period being during an unexpected General Election campaign) and raised thousands again for Lib Dem Local Parties and other organisations, and is being run for 2020 now – the Lib Dem Draw 2020 date will be 10th December, with more great prizes!