Liberal Democrats

Prater Raines has been the leading provider of online campaigning tools to the Liberal Democrats since 2002. Our scalable, hosted solution is used by hundreds of Lib Dem sites across the country – from MPs to MEPs, local parties to party campaign organisations, council groups and regions. Find out more here.

Graphs of age and ethnicity distribution around the country from census data

I’m delighted that there’s been a twenty year trend in the United Kingdom for free and open access to more and more government data. Information about the public that has been largely collected at taxpayer expense should be made as widely available as possible, in open, machine- and human-readable formats.

So I’m especially proud that it’s a Liberal Democrat peer who is making the latest push for regular publishing of the Postcode Address File, the Royal Mail dataset of every address in the country.

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Boundary map of the Westminster constituency of Beaconsfield

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.

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Sarah Dyke wins Somerton and Frome

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.

Liberal Democrats tech Blog website based on Typo3

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.

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Lib dem Draw 2020 website screenshot

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!

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Prater Raines advert

An advert has been made for Prater Raines as part of our sponsorship of the Lib Dem Podcast.

We would like to thank our friends at Lib Dem Podcast for creating this advert for Prater Raines.  We are really impressed with their standard of work and their turnaround time.

The Lib Dem Podcast discusses the news, advice and commentary on UK and global political events.

If you haven’t listened to the Lib Dem Podcast yet you can watch it here. 

Listen to the latest Lib Dem pod cast here.

Read about how we can provide the technical expertise for organisations and campaign groups.

 

Lighthouse Liberal Democrats

Prater Raines are proud to be the developers of the Liberal Democrats’ membership management portal “Lighthouse”.

Lighthouse is an internal Party online management application, which gives the  secure access to Party information to the officers of the local party and other internal organisations that need it.

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Mark Pack

Some of the Prater Raines team have known Mark Pack for many years (probably rather more than any of us are prepared to admit). We were delighted when he approached us to become part of Mark’s campaign team to become the next President of the Liberal Democrats.

Mark announced his campaign on Thursday prior to the launch of conference, and his campaign website went live at the same time.  The Mark Pack President campaign site is built on WordPress and  there is much more to come. However,  the sign-up (feeding to MailChimp), donate (backed by Stripe) and contact pages are in place, and we’ll be adding more pages and content in coming days. Mark Pack  for President!

 

Party Portal for the Liberal Democrats.. GDPR Compliance

Prater Raines are delighted to be working with the Liberal Democrats on the development of a new Local and Regional Party Portal. This is due to launch in January 2020.

The Portal will be a user friendly web interface to allow Local and Regional Party Officers to:

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Liberal Democrat Christmas Draw

In September 2017, the management of the Liberal Democrat Christmas Draw told us they were hanging up their tombola wheel. It made us dad that they were going to stop the draw after over 20 years.

The Lib Dem Christmas Draw was a nationally organised ticket based raffle run by a team of volunteers since 1995. In that time, it raised well over half a million pounds for local parties and central Lib Dem funds.  Party members,  supporters their families and friends won over 800 prizes.

However, in recent years there had been a fall in the number of Local Parties participating. Much of this was due to the amount of work that was involved for the Local Parties and the draw organisers. Tasks such as ordering, distributing, collecting and sending back the tickets, stubs and money. Buying the tickets became more inconvenient as the use of cheques fell. The draw looked to be on the way out.

But it remained a great idea, and a really strong fundraiser for the Party. So after discussion, we were delighted to be commissioned to develop and launch the new online Liberal Democrat Christmas Draw.

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