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.
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.
When the Liberal Democrats initially came up with the specification for what would turn out to be their Fleet website system, simple bilinguality for the Welsh State and Welsh Local Party sites was a key requirement.
The need helped guide us towards Typo3 as a platform. It was designed for the job, which in this case was to make it simple to build in both English and Welsh languages and switch between them.
We’ve built Fleet for our Welsh sites to offer that option. We’ve worked with a translator and the Welsh Party so that the “scaffolding” of sites automatically translates between pages. However, we’ve also made it easy for site editors to create the rest in both languages – from menu items to full pages and news articles.
Context is also key, and its not just the text that can vary between versions. It maybe that there is a better picture to illustrate the Welsh language version of an article than the one used on the English version. You can change that too. And the descriptive text like alt tags, descriptions and even url click-throughs can also be set by language: brilliant!
We’re regularly asked why we don’t use automatic translation of content blocks from English to Welsh. Answer: it still sounds terrible. An automatic translation will generally give the “flavour” but also be absolutely obvious to a native Welsh speaker. Want a Welsh translation? You need a Welsh speaker!
We’re delighted the Liberal Democrats chose Prater Raines to develop and host their websites for their national, regional and local parties. We’re really proud of the Fleet platform we’ve built alongside them, and now supports over 300 Liberal Democrat websites.
As we’ve been working with the Party for 21+ years, we knew the challenges, especially around election times. Visitor numbers increase, by a factor, fast, and then do it again through to polling day.
So in May, when a snap General Election was called, we knew we had to be ready. And so did our website hosting.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.