“Leaflets more effective than social media”
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Driving to distribute some election leaflets this afternoon I heard someone on BBC4 radio's one o'clock news being interviewed about the pro-EU leaflet the government is to distribute to everybody. Professor Philip Cowley of Queen Mary University London was asked why political parties distribute leaflets. He replied "because they work". He went on to say that the most effective wait to communicate with voters was face-to-face door-to-door canvassing but said this was time consuming and only reached a limited number. Next was mass leafletting which reaches many more people and the leaflets are noticed even between the letter box and the rubbish bin. Social media, he said, was a poor third in terms of effectiveness and secondary to old-dashioned ways of campaigning.
The interview can be heard here (it starts 13 minutes 14 seconds in):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b075t5n1
I must confess that I was surprised since, in view of the poor direct response we get to election leaflets I was beginning to doubt their effectiveness but, apparently, they are noticed, even on the way to the rubbish bin.
There must be a lesson here, perhaps that contesting elections and leafleting is better than tweeting and that we shouldn't abandon this (nor tweeting either of course).
I have been a proponent of leafletting but with the caveat that we use a variety of them in different styles as evidenced by my past posts when there is a protest and i invariably suggest it. Our weakness in my view is that we produce a standard one-size-fits all leaflet.In elections as now, we have three candidates in London, three separate leaflets could have been produced and we would have an opportunity to judge the most effective from the feed-back. Just what was to lose…scarcely the number of votes. As the Prof explained, face-to-face was the most effective form of persuasion, so lets have more presence of these street lit-stalls that are being conducted (I know I'm not going to be popular saying this but a couple of hours around noon is simply not long enough on a Saturday) where we also do some leafletting. Couldn't we have some sort of rotation and also do week-days? I know, the usual answer…where are the volunteers coming from?…a financial enticement? Expenses, a pint and a bar-meal courtesy of the Party, maybe. Possibly even cinema/theatre tickets as a reward for the stalwarts. Would we be so shocked that some members are then revealed as being so mercenary…
alanjjohnstone wrote:I know I'm not going to be popular saying this but a couple of hours around noon is simply not long enough on a SaturdayNo you're not going to be ! This is just the time period when we guarantee to any other members and sympathisers who may want to turn up that there will be a stall there. We may well stay longer and, if we don't, we'll be distributing leaflets door to door nearby.
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