How to show what matters to your local community

We will cover using what you heard to engage local election candidates in a way that feels positive and rooted in your community’s priorities.

Use your listening campaign to engage candidates and help:

• show candidates what people in their area care about most
• keep conversations hopeful and focused on solutions
• empower people in your community to speak directly to those seeking their vote
• reach new audiences who may not usually get involved in campaigning

A quick summary of the next steps:  

1. Bring together what you heard through your listening activities
2. Identify a small number of shared priorities
3. Create a Charter of Hope using those priorities and our template  
4. Feedback to the community who helped shape your priorities
5. Use the Charter of Hope to engage election candidates.  

Making a Charter of Hope

Start by gathering everything you collected during your listening campaign. This might include online survey responses or responses from stalls or door knocking and notes from conversations or events.  

Identify the issues that came up again-and-again and were a concern shared by people from different backgrounds. 

Decide 3-5 priorities to focus on. This is the basis of your Charter for Hope.  

We’ve created this template you can use to create a poster with your top priorities. If you need support editing this template on Canva email [email protected].  

The template includes graphics for each of the top 10 priorities that may have come up.

You can choose what your community wants this election from the priorities.

You’ll need to print your Charter for Hope so you can use it as a leaflet and a poster when sharing it locally. We’ve got a printing fund to help you do this. Email [email protected] to request support with printing costs up to £200. 

How to share your charter for hope

Feedback to the community  

Sharing what you heard is just as important as taking it to candidates. It shows respect for people’s time and builds trust. If you did a street survey or stall, consider going back to the same place to share what you heard and what you’re doing with it.

Around the community    

Think about the key places you could put up a paper copy of your Charter of Hope for people to see.  Here’s a few ideas to get you started:    

• Community notice boards
• Community centres
• Food banks
• Cafes and shops
• Wholefood shops
• Places of worship
• Schools, colleges, universities
• Libraries
• Swimming pools and sports centres
• Local businesses
• Sports clubs and centres  

You can maximise your reach, and ensure as many people as possible see your Charter of Hope by sharing it online to. That includes, making a video, sharing images of your charter, posting it on social media and engaging the local media.  

Updating partners  

Let local groups, faith organisations or community partners who helped know what came out of the listening and how it’s being used and invite them to engage their candidates alongside your group. 

Engaging local election candidates

Supporting communities to speak to candidates

As well as feeding back what you heard through your listening activities, it’s important to give people clear ways to engage local election candidates. This helps people feel more involved in the campaign and makes it more likely that candidates will hear and respond to your community’s priorities.

When handing out leaflets with your Charter of Hope, you can suggest that if a candidate door-knocks, people ask them a question linked to one of the priorities. Reassure people that this can be a short conversation and that they’re speaking on behalf of their community, not as experts.

When sharing the Charter of Hope with your mailing lists or on social media you can:

• Ask people to email their candidates, and share a template email.
• Encourage people to share your social media posts tagging local candidates.
• Suggest that people attend a hustings – whether you’re organising one or not – and ask a question about one of the priorities.

Other ways to engage candidates

During a local election there can be 100s of candidates in your area.  But an easy and effective way to engage candidates is to send them an email with your charter of hope and ask for a response on the priorities you set out.  

We’ve laid out how to find their contact details and a template email you can send.

Hustings

One of the tried and tested tools during an election is hustings. We would recommend running hustings jointly with other groups or attending hustings being organised and asking a question.

If a candidate supports one of your priorities, a simple photo with the Charter of Hope can reinforce accountability and be helpful to generating local media and social media coverage.  

The ways of digitally sharing your Charter of Hope, including on social media and in the local media will help you reach candidate too.

Resources

Here’s a summary of the resources available to help you with this stage of the campaign.  

• Editable Charter of Hope - this is available in 3 sizes to allow printing of leaflets, posters and social media assets.
• Template social media posts to share your Charter of Hope.
• Support using Canva to create your charter of hope (email [email protected]).  
• A printing fund up to £200 (email [email protected]).
• Template press release to share your Charter of Hope (ready end of Feb)
• A guide on sharing your charter of hope with election candidates.  
• A template email to send to election candidates.
• A guide on running a hustings.  
• A bank of questions about each of the campaign demands to select from and ask candidates.  
• A pack to help you promote your hustings, including posters and social media assets (ready early March).