Software volunteers

We need to update our software systems by June 2023. Currently we run everything through NationBuilder, an integrated package that provides a volunteer, member and supporter database, interactive web pages, and bulk communications. Their prices are going up in June, so we have decided to look for a group of software packages that will let us effectively:

• maintain an interactive website that will inform voters and make it easy for supporters to engage and sign up for things,
• manage volunteer journeys, from when they first hear of us right up to when they are running teams of volunteers,
• keep up to date membership data,
• find voters, persuade them to vote Green, record data on them, then use that data to get them to come out and vote,
• manage communications with supporters,
• all while maintaining resilience and managing privacy.

If you might be interested in helping us select, test and customise different software systems, please sign up below as a software volunteer.

The first steps will be to look for good canvassing systems, as Action Network (supported by the national party) does not handle voter data or canvassing (it was designed for email campaigns). There is a national group of volunteers working on developing a canvassing system, the Canvassing Software Members Working Group. There are also some already developed systems we could explore. We will arrange some online demos.

Johnny Peacock has produced a better design for our NationBuilder web site. Later we can transfer the design to another content management system. But right now we need more people writing and editing content to keep the site fresh.

Action Network currently handles data on members. We need to work out how to adapt our instance to manage volunteer and supporter data as well as we do in NationBuilder.