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I feel compelled to post about 'that Labourhome poll'. I am one of the folks that help run the site, primarily alongside co-founders Alex Hilton and Jag Singh, therefore I have my fingerprints all over the decision to regularly poll our members.
One important function of online communities such as Labourhome is that it can act as a block when expressing views and opinions. Our job is to facilitate that and help the members get behind particular campaigns e.g. the recent demand for better behaviour in the fundraising area.
We decided exactly a year ago to use online polling as a way of aggregating the voices on the site and amplifying their concerns into mainstream media. This ensures that the voice of the grassroots on Labourhome is represented against the plethora of pressure groups, think tanks, trade unions, consultants, backbenchers and former ministers. It also means that people have an incentive to participate and contribute more to the community if they see that their concerns will be taken to a higher level.
We've done this roughly every month for a year. Sometimes the poll is positive on the Party, sometimes it carries views on how we can all do better. This time we negotiated an exclusive deal with the Independent, who splashed on their front page that 55% of Party activists would like a new leader.
People rightly ask questions. How do you purport to represent Labour's grassroots? We don't, just the thousands that use our site. How do you know you are not attracting Tories in disguise that will make mischief for the Party? We use the same software used by the Hilary Clinton campaign. To reflect the mischievous nature of Tories on the blogosphere, we can track and screen out repeat users, users from particular IP addresses e.g. Tory HQ (!), geographical locations (a bunch of people from Prague?!) and screen out users who are linked through from Tory supporting blogs. Were you paid in terms of cash or favours for working with the Inde? Nope. Placing an exclusive in return for a better splash is part and parcel of media relations.
The million-dollar question is - will you do another one? Yes, but I talk a lot about the Party listening more to the grassroots and adapting its approach. We are listening also and will pay heed to the feelings of our users, Labour bloggers and folks within the Party.
4 comments
But as we both know there is almost no control over the sample in this case. Chucking out Guido, Prague Tory and CCHQ is hardly getting to grips. 100s of the respondents could be non activists, non members, non supporters.
And in all sorts of ways even those who are activists, members and supporters (proportion unknown) are not representative of the universe of activists, members and supporters.
The Indy mis-sold this poll either on their own account or because they were misled by Labour Home. In turn the Indy piece was misrepresented in the MSM. Labout Home didn't get much credit actually.
The poll was flakey. The Indy report was flakey. Labour Home remains a long way from being the boy she says she is. Which is a shame. And the ministerial rankings by the way are also not measuring what they claim to measure.
Making claims about what you can do, when what you did do was something different, is disingenuous in the extreme.
Funnily, every time we've tried to blog about this on LabourHome it's disappeared.
I'm not saying the methodology was perfect - but it did capture the mood of the grassroots. And there's only one poll that matters in my opinion - the General Election.
At any rate, we were able to track where people came from, if they came back, their computer IP address, if they'd taken a survey previously (and given a different answer to the "I'm a labour supporter" question). It's not just about chucking out Guido's responses, it's about knowing who Guido, etc had told about the survey, and discounting all their responses if they fit our criteria.
It makes absolutely no difference whether a person is a supporter, or a party member; if a group of people are backing Labour and they have a message to deliver to their leaders then Labourhome will continue to assist them voice their opinions. The leadership challenge dilemma didn't start because of this poll; this poll was a response to all those papers claiming that MPs were lining up for leadership nomination forms.
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