Baby steps... but I'll take them

This week I got a small piece of news that made me unreasonably happy.

A consultant got in touch. They had seen my keynote on why we need to listen closely to the humans when it comes to lobbying and were working with one of the campaigning tech platforms. To my delight they had been busy applying some of the research findings. Huzzah!

Could I help them test something? Yes indeedy I certainly could.

It's a small change, but could it make someone's life a bit easier? Yes. Could it potentially help soften the growing animosity around MPs offices getting bombarded with unwieldy campaign emails? Well, maybe a little. The important thing is that the concerns I've been raising have been heard.

I helped them with the test and the feedback that came back was slightly wonderful. Yes: the new approach was just a little bit easier for the office to process and respond to.

We can call that a win!

OK so we did a test, and surprise surprise, there's more...

Here's an important bit (insert image of me banging my head against a wall): One MP's office came back with additional unsolicited feedback all about how the layout could be improved.

Wonderful, you might say! Well, yes but also a massive resounding ugh.

The extremely helpful advice we received landed like a clanger to my ears. It was another example of something utterly basic that the lobbying industry had failed to grasp by simply not asking the right questions to the people that matter.

It's this lack of joined-up thinking that got me started on the journey in the first place. Here at The Developer Society, the humans come first. Go and read back on any of our blogs and you'll see what I mean. Accessibility, trauma-informed design, hunting for process bottlenecks that can be alleviated, the list goes on. This is our bread and butter.

So whilst there's genuine joy in seeing the hard work I've put in to understand the broken system of email lobbying, a lot of time could have been saved if we just ask the questions first.

To reiterate...

We're often not dealing with a technology problem per se. It's the intersection where humans and technology meet. That's where we need to be looking, and building accordingly.

One of the things I keep coming back to in this research is how rarely the people who design campaign emails are thinking about the person on the other end. So much so that I've started calling these wonderful, hardworking individuals the invisible layer. They are never in the room when campaign strategy gets made, when technology is being designed. And yet they are the people and systems that tools and platforms actually have to work for.

Meaningful moment?

It was genuinely wonderful to see change happening, What are we here for but for the impact?

However, the truth is that I still think we need to overhaul the whole sector. I think we're in a genuine democratic crisis of how civil society communicates with parliament, and the technology arms race (more emails, faster, AI talking to AI) is making it worse, not better. Better tech helps, but it's better thinking about people.

Baby steps... but real ones

Whilst this one change won't address the structural problems I've been discovering. The volume is still overwhelming. The template campaigns are still flooding inboxes. The invisible layer is still largely invisible to the people making strategic decisions about how to lobby parliament.

We at The Developer Society love revolutionary people and revolutionary thinking, and yet we are realistic about how we bring about change: it rarely arrives all at once. It starts with better questions.

That's how we get there. Slowly, and then all at once.

The research is ongoing. More to come.

Got a question or a problem you think we can help with? Get in touch

If you're a campaigner and you want to talk about the research, email me! If you're a mission-driven organisation and want to talk to us about how we can help you design better systems for the humans that use them, get in touch. We would absolutely love to help.