Role description: Branch Secretary

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Branch Secretary

As Secretary of a local Labour branch, it’s your role to be Labour’s local figurehead and support the branch to be an active, campaigning local movement where local members are encouraged to get involved as much as possible.

Key Responsibilities and tasks

  • Organising regular branch meetings and emailing members about local activity
  • Maintaining accurate contact details for members through Organise and Admin Hub and providing membership information to other officers as required
  • Working to ensure your branch is welcoming and friendly to new people, well organised and an open and fair place where members feel involved and have a stake in the direction of the branch
  • Developing a strong and consistent communication strategy, making sure that all your members are well informed on party activity

Activity

A rich variety of activity throughout the year will not only ensure that the Party will have a strong presence in your local area, but will also make sure that everybody gets the most out of their membership.

All officers of the branch should provide opportunities for others to become involved, and ensure events and campaign activities are organised to involve people in the local community.

You should aim to have a range of different campaigning activities, working with colleagues across your CLP to plan joint social events, coffee mornings and policy discussions, as well as separate branch events and campaigning. You should try to bring guest speakers along to events as well as making sure every member has met your locally elected representatives.

Meetings

You should work alongside your branch Chair and CLP Secretary and Chair to arrange the time, date and venue for meetings in good time, ensuring it doesn’t clash with CLP meetings. You will have a lot of functional business to go through at your meetings, but please make sure that they are interesting and welcoming.

It is important to have political discussions and lively, respectful debates at meetings.  However, it is also the Secretary’s responsibility to ensure that meetings and discussions relate to the following key functions of the branch:

  • Campaigning – campaigning for change in the local community and campaign to get our candidates elected
  • Support elected representatives to carry out working, campaigning and representing the branch
  • Membership work – welcoming new members, recruiting new members and finding new supporters
  • Fundraising – making sure your branch has the money it needs to campaign by confirming a programme of social events as well as other fundraising activity. You will need to work closely with the CLP Officers, and branch Chair and Treasurer to do this
  • Policy discussion – make sure this is interesting and engaging

As Branch Secretary you should ensure that minutes of the meeting are recorded and circulated afterwards. You may also wish to distribute copies of any relevant correspondence in support of your minutes.

Working with your CLP

As a branch, you should work closely with CLP officers to ensure you are all working towards the same goals and sharing information.

  • Keep in regular contact with your CLP Secretary, and ask them to keep you informed of training opportunities and campaign information so you can share this with branch members
  • Branch Secretaries are able to access Admin Hub and Organise for their branches, so you could ask your CLP Secretary or someone in your CLP to run you through how it works and what you can use it for
  • Ensure you discuss with your CLP Secretary and Chair what you’ll both be covering at CLP and Branch meetings, so this isn’t duplicated at branch meetings and to make sure important information is discussed at branch level
  • Think about appointing branch buddies who can help with member engagement work and to welcome new members in your branch

Admin Hub

As Branch Secretary, you’ll have access to Admin Hub and Organise, Labour’s online membership database, to access and update information about your branch.  You can use Admin Hub to update members’ details and use Organise to email members and engage them in campaigns and activities.

Useful links and contacts

There are many other contacts and resources to assist you in your role. Keep up to date with our latest campaigns, find out more about Campaign Technology, find resources for role holders and check our online training offer at www.labour.org.uk/resources. You can also purchase and download membership recruitment and campaign materials from the Campaign Shop.

For useful guides and resources on campaign technology, membership engagement and how to use Organise to full effect, visit http://help.labour.org.uk, and if you need support or advice, you can contact your national or regional office.

Training resources are available at https://achieve.labour.org.uk.