Role description: CLP Vice Chair (Campaigns & Membership)

CLP Vice-Chair Campaigns & Membership

Across the country, the aim for every Labour CLP should be to campaign for change in our local communities and campaign to get our candidates elected. Working with members and harnessing the skills of our volunteers through a vibrant, inclusive, outward-looking local party is crucial to this.

The Vice-Chair Campaigns & Membership is an important role within a local Labour Party in achieving this aim; it could suit someone who enjoys talking to and motivating people, shows leadership, and is positive and energetic and wants to help Labour win! As CLP Vice Chair, you will act as a direct liaison with our members to ensure your party is an effective unit, that all members get as much as they possibly can out of their membership and that we run a winning campaign.

Key responsibilities and tasks

• Hold a leadership role in the CLP, including standing in for the Chair when absent, and attending the executive committee as a voting member.
• Grow an engaged local membership base by recruiting and retaining active members, and provide a welcoming and supportive environment to all members. Ensure membership and campaigning are at the heart of all CLP activity.
• Show leadership for the campaign, with a campaign plan for the full cycle of local and national elections in the area.
• Develop a team by motivating members, supporters and volunteers. Identify talent in others, encouraging and supporting those who want to get involved, with training opportunities and requirements.
• Be familiar with and use campaign tools like Contact Creator, Organise and Connects.
• Work closely with candidates, elected representatives, Party Officers, neighbouring CLPs and existing structures to ensure that an effective, co-ordinated campaign is delivered in the area.
• Build upon existing relationships across the Labour movement including Trade Unions and affiliates.

Activity

The role of CLP Vice-Chair Campaigns & Membership is all about creating a welcoming and supportive environment for new and existing members, building an effective campaign team and motivating volunteers. You shouldn’t need to do everything yourself but oversee the delivery of the campaign and membership strategy. There are many strands that make up a successful campaign and you will work to build a team in order to achieve these goals.

As well as campaigning, you should encourage members to attend meetings and campaign events, to get involved and take action on issues that matter to them, regardless of their interests, experience and skills.

In managing your CLP’s membership, you should work with the Secretary and Branch Labour Party (BLP) Secretaries to ensure new members are recruited and welcomed, and members are up-to-date with their payments. Sometimes a simple phone call from you can be the difference between a member falling out of membership and renewing their membership.

You will have access to our Organise campaign system to track the status of members and volunteers in your local area and get in touch with them to keep them engaged. You should be aiming to make contact with new members and others requiring attention, but this doesn’t all have to be done by you alone! You should think about setting up a small membership group who will be responsible for getting in touch with members.

In managing the campaign, you’ll be the organiser and manager of all the component strands associated with your campaign. You’ll work with other CLP role holders, especially the Secretary, to organise some parts of the campaigning directly, and you’ll have a strategic oversight of the other elements being delivered by other members of the team.

You will work across the local party with all role holders such as the Chair, Secretary, Treasurer and Agent, in order to ensure that campaigns are effective, co-ordinated, affordable, legal and strategic. A good understanding of and willingness to embrace community organising techniques will enable your campaign to increase capacity and campaign effectively in the communities that we seek to represent.

Successful campaigns are not just executed within the last few weeks before polling day; they are the culmination of a plan with short and longer term milestones.

This role is varied and exciting, and you can make a real difference to your local party through this position. You can choose how to focus your role and what to make your priority depending on what sort of activities that local members want to see and what is in the constituency plan.

Meetings

Local meetings will be a key way of building capacity and updating members on the campaign.  At each CLP meeting, you should:

• Actively encourage each member to contribute to any discussions and find out more about their interests.
• Let members know about opportunities to get involved in the campaign and important tasks and deadlines coming up soon.  You could think about doing a skills audit or survey to find out how members can help and what aspect of the campaign they’re interested in getting involved with. Share details of any training that members can get involved with.
• Work with members to plan new and creative ways to increase membership participation in campaigns and activities, and new methods of recruitment.
• Report what activity you have been doing to increase retention, recruitment and engagement, and report back on the campaign, activity, progress, forthcoming plans and next steps, print, local issues etc.
• Ask members to provide any new or updated contact details for you to record on Admin Hub.
• Think about regular ways of incorporating campaigning into CLP meetings –  hold a voter ID or member mobilisation phone bank before or after the meeting, or use part of the meeting as a campaign planning session.

Working with branches

If your CLP has a branch structure, you should work with and offer support to branches to contribute to the campaign.  Particularly in larger CLPs, delegating work to branches will make your job easier and lead to a more effective and cohesive CLP. Working with and recruiting BLP Secretaries, Membership Secretaries and Ward Organisers will share the workload. You will need to devise an overall strategy with branches, taking into account where your target wards are and where activity should be concentrated.

• It is the responsibility of CLP officers to ensure branch officers are fully supported and confident in their roles.  You should ensure that important information is cascaded down to branch level, and that any training opportunities are also offered to branch officers. 
• Organise meetings with officers, Councillors and candidates in each branch, to discuss the campaign and the role each branch will play. Consider offering training with tools like Organise and Contact Creator.
• You could establish a ‘twinning’ system so branches in non-target wards can help out in target wards.
• Keep in touch with branch membership secretaries to ensure member engagement and retention work is being carried out, and that new members are being welcomed by their branch.

Campaign and Membership Technology

As Vice-Chair Campaigns & Membership, you will need to have a good understanding of the campaign technology tools we use in the Labour Party to organise our campaigns.  Lots of help, advice and resources are available on this through the Campaign Technology team and the Training & Mobilisation team – you’ll find their contact details in the section below.

Contact Creator: Contact Creator is the party’s online voter communication database.  You’ll need access to Contact Creator print out voter ID sheets, input information on voters and other day to day campaign tasks.  If you don’t already have access, your CLP Secretary will be able to give permission for us to set this up for you.

Connects: You can download and purchase a host of customisable campaign materials via Connects, including out cards, direct mails and newsletters.  To log in, you’ll just need your Labour Hub login details at connects.labour.org.uk

Organise and Admin Hub: In this role you’ll automatically have access to Admin Hub, Labour’s online membership database, and Organise, our mobilisation and volunteer management tool. To log in to these, just use your usual Labour Hub login. You can use Admin Hub to update members’ details and maintain information on your CLP and roles. Organise allows you to record volunteers’ skills and campaigning preferences.

It is the responsibility of the CLP Secretary to keep CLP roles up to date on Admin Hub, and this will ensure all CLP and Branch Officers receive the right information relating to their roles.

Organise provides the tools you need to contact, engage and mobilise your members and volunteers. You can use it to send emails, call members, create events and plan your campaigns.

Log into Organise at labourorganise.com

Achieve: Achieve is the Party’s online training platform where you can find out more about this role, the Party’s campaigns and other tools mentioned here.

Head to achieve.labour.org.uk