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.
We’ve hosted the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland’s high traffic national site since 2005.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
We’ve been proud to be the website provider for the cross-community Alliance Party of Northern Ireland for over eleven years, and throughout that period, the magnificent David Ford has been Party Leader.
It was with real sadness that we learned David was standing down as Leader a few weeks ago, but we were equally delighted to learn former Alliance MP Naomi Long was standing to take over from him.
On the day of her election we helped Alliance get a new splash screen on the front page of their introducing Naomi as Leader in place, and encouraging supporters of the Party to sign up as members.
The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland is Northern Ireland’s largest cross-community, anti-segregation, anti-sectarian political party.
Since 2005 Prater Raines Ltd has provided the party’s national website and the party leader David Ford’s site.
We’ve worked closely with Alliance on the design and functionality of their sites.
The national site is a high traffic political website built on top of dependable hosting with room for growth. When the election of Naomi Long to the Westminster parliament caused a sudden 30-fold increase in traffic, we were able to handle the spike effortlessly.
Foci2 is our affordable, custom-built, fully-featured, customisable website application for Liberal Democrat groups.
The service costs just £17 +VAT per calendar month with a one-off fee of £42 +VAT for setting up a new site. The monthly fee includes everything you need to get online.