Organisations & Campaigners

Prater Raines has years of experience developing and hosting websites and online systems that help campaign groups get their message across to activists and to the public.

Podium discussion at T3CON23

As Germany moves away from closed source software to a strategy using TYPO3 for all government websites, I joined Jana Höffner and Nikolai Jaklitsch at this year’s T3CON in Düsseldorf to discuss software in government and how Open Source is the only way to guarantee digital sovereignity, foster local talent and create a digital economy.

Continue reading…

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.

Continue reading…

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.

Continue reading…

HG Wells Short Story Competition. Vision: Rig

Prater Raines are delighted to bring live the 2020 HG Wells Short Story Competition website. This website provides information about the competition, rules and is the only way to enter.

We are proud to be in our third year as sponsors for this competition.

The annual HG Wells Short Story Competition offers a £500 Senior and £1,000 Junior prize. The prize also includes a free publication of all shortlisted entries in a quality, professionally published paperback anthology. The prize also includes a  Kindle version.

Entry to the Junior competition is FREE and entry to the Senior competition is £10 (£5 for those with student ID).

This years theme is “Vision” – see how to enter (yes, pun intended) on their site – 2020 closing date is 6th July 2020.

SCA: Debit and Credit Cards

SCA: Strong Customer Authentication is coming. This is will change the way a large number of credit and debit card transactions that happen online.

At Prater Raines we will  be working with all of our clients that take online payments, to ensure their systems are compliant.  The SCA regulation will reduce the incidence of fraud and increase security. It will introduce a two-factor authentication on electronic payments.

Any clients that use GoCardless (the DD based payment / donation processor) will  unlikely see any changes.  Additionally, following  an initial set up businesses taking recurring payments by card will not be effected. There is a blog post explaining more about how they expect these SCA changes to effect their payments in the future.

End Our Pain Campaign to Legalise Medical Cannabis

We were delighted to be asked by our friends at Tendo Consulting to help with work on the End Our Pain campaign , which is a Campaign to Legalise Medical Cannabis. We started by moving their existing campaign website onto WordPress. When the new site was updated the  “Email Your MP” functionality was put into place. This “Email Your MP” functionality was developed by us to help people lobby their MP directly.

You may have seen a lot of coverage (in the Mail on Sunday, across the BBC and elsewhere) about Alfie Dingley. Alfie suffers from severe epilepsy needs medical cannabis to control his epilepsy. The news coverage and Social Media support from a huge range of people including Patrick Stewart – saw THOUSANDS email their MP.  Many thousands more signed the End Our Pain petition.

Continue reading…

H G Wells Short Story Competition 2018

We’re proud to be supporting the HG Wells Short Story Competition in 2018, providing their website and  giving Facebook support. It’s great to see that this year’s competition is going well (get your entries in by 23 July!).

We rebuilt their site onto our own WordPress hosting (including SSL support, daily backups, keeping WordPress updated with all the most recent patches and updates etc), and new for 2018 created the online entry process, replacing the former post or email entry system.

Continue reading…

Party Portal for the Liberal Democrats.. GDPR Compliance

Prater Raines are delighted to be accredited by the Liberal Democrats as an Approved Supplier under their GDPR compliance programme. We’ve been supplying websites for the Party for over 15 years, so really hoped we would!

The accreditation is for our Lib Dem “Foci” website service as a “Website, Email, Campaigns and Social Media Platform”.

However, our WordPress installations and support are acknowledged to meet their GDPR compliance requirements as well.  Our WordPress sites have UK hosting and always run on the latest version.  They automatically upgrade on your behalf, ensuring data is stored within the local WordPress database. Additionally providing regular plugin updates and built-in SSL support.

Continue reading…

Email Your MP functionality

Tendo Consulting approached us to make some updates to the Fair Tax on Flying site which was part of a campaign they were working on for a client.

There were a number of content changes to the site. A key new feature required was to rebuild the existing “Email an MP” functionality. This was designed to use up to date open source data and give the ability to look up the appropriate MP from a supplied postcode.  Additionally, then providing different suggested email texts based on the user’s selections.

This we did, building our own WordPress plugins to add the functionality. This project involved updating an existing site on its own existing hosting.  As the hosting was not provided by us, it did add some complexity to the project. However, we’re really pleased with the result!

We work with organisations and companies, understanding their needs and working with them. We can provide an “Email Your MP “functionality to your campaign.

Can we help you?

Well this IS nice: an article on our local paper about the H G Wells Short Story Competition 2017, with Prater Raines named as a sponsor.

The Prater Raines team took on the running of their WordPress website for the competition in 2017, providing volunteer support to manage the site, update content and editing the site.

Continue reading…