How to...files

General advice

From developing a public awareness strategy to dealing with the media, planning and evaluating your work, this section provides general advice to help you promote electoral awareness in your area. Primarily targeted at electoral administrators, other practitioners may find this section useful as well.

How to develop a public awareness strategy

Electoral administrators have a new duty to promote public awareness of the electoral process. If you don't already have one, developing a public awareness strategy will help you tackle this duty and maximize the time and resources you have available to you.

You strategy doesn't have to be complicated or long, just a couple of A4 sheets mapping out your public awareness work over the next one to two years.

You may find it useful to download our public awareness strategy template.

Things you can do to help develop your strategy

Set up a public awareness working group: You could set up a working group with electoral administrators from neighbouring areas and with key service providers or community groups in your area. This group can help develop and monitor your strategy.

Do an information audit: Work with your local council to assess where people are likely to pick up information or fill out forms, for example when joining the library or paying bills. Make sure voter registration forms are placed at all council service points.
Build on existing work: Find out if any democratic engagement work is already been done by democratic services or local youth and community service teams and see if you can incorporate this work into your strategy.
Target under registered groups: Identify which groups are under represented in terms of electoral registration in your area.
Find local contact organisations: Try and identify which local organisations or individuals have access to, or influence with, the groups you have identified. They could be voluntary sector groups, youth or social services workers, housing associations, sports clubs or churches, the list is endless.
Set out when to target the groups: If you have limited resources you may not be able to target all these groups at once, so it is worthwhile making it explicit in your strategy which groups you will target when.
Identify key events: Focusing your activity around key events such as up coming elections, voter registration deadlines; local democracy week; black history month; freshers' weeks. etc can lift exposure of your work.
Be realistic: It doesn't matter how many glossy leaflets, radio or television advertisements you have, the key to promoting public awareness at a local level is by building good partnerships across council departments and community groups.

How to evaluate your public awareness work

Evaluation will help you collect the right information about your work so that you can tell the story about your successes and what you learned, and make recommendations for the future.

It's important to think about evaluation at the beginning of your project. It is much easier to explain your project to others and report on its success, if you have outlined your idea. But remember, even if your projects are ongoing or already underway, it is never too late to collect the right data to assess your work.

Here is a three-step evaluation process to plan and report on your project work. We have also supplied templates to help kick-start your project.

Step 1: Project brief: define your project
Step 2: Evaluation plan: decide how and when you need to collect data
Step 3: Evaluation report template: write your evaluation report

Useful tools: This glossary of evaluation terms and more in-depth information about developing your plan may also help.

How to write in plain English

Get your information across clearly and concisely by following these suggestions from the Plain English Campaign.

Stop and think before you start writing. Make a note of the points you want to make in a logical order.
Prefer short words. Long words will not impress your customers or help your writing style.
Use everyday English whenever possible. Avoid jargon and legalistic words, and explain any technical terms you have to use.
Keep your sentence length down to an average of 15 to 20 words. Try to stick to one main idea in a sentence.
Use active verbs as much as possible. Say 'we will do it' rather than 'it will be done by us'.
Be concise.
Imagine you are talking to your reader. Write sincerely, personally, in a style that is suitable and with the right tone of voice.

Useful tools: The Plain English Campaign have a guide to writing in plan English which you can download from the free guides section of their website.

With thanks to the Plain English Campaign for allowing us to adapt this material.

How to work with the media

Working with local media can be a useful and cost efficient way to get your information across to the public. The main thing is to make sure the messages you deliver to the media are timely, accurate, and interesting!

For the annual canvass in 2008, we've put together some of our popular press release templates, which you can use to get the registration message out. Just download the files below and fill in the spaces - if you have one, someone from your communication team may be able to help you.

When creating press releases:

keep it as short as possible without missing out vital information
avoid jargon/acronyms/technical terms
ensure vital information: who, what, when, where, and how is at the top of the release
focus on what is new or interesting about the story
include dates, times, and venues
include statistics where possible
include quotes
operational information for journalists (such as arrangements for an event and contact details for further information) can be included in a notes to editors section or in a covering email/fax rather than in the main body of the release.

When setting up an interview:

get full details of the interviewing journalist full name, position (editor, political correspondent), contact details.
research their publication online, look for previous articles to get an idea of the angle they may be coming from
if it is a television or radio interview, find out if it will be live or pre-recorded. Ask for a pre-record if possible.
try to get an idea of the types of questions they want answering. If the journalist strays from the subject, you can say you are sticking to the subject that you have been asked to speak about.

When being interviewed:

decide on three key messages
refer back to them as much as you can
don't try to tackle a question you don't know the answer to. You are entitled to say that it isn't in your area of expertise.
if the interview is pre-recorded, then don't be afraid to ask to answer the question again (within reason!).

Producing fact sheets on particular issues or events can also help when dealing with journalists.

Producing leaflets

Leaflets can be a great way to get across messages about voter awareness. The can be handed out to people, either by hand, by post, inserted in local newspapers for distribution, left in venues, shops, restaurants, cafes, libraries... anywhere they will catch a person's eye.

You can order and distribute Electoral Commission materials for free, or create materials that are suited to your needs.

Why produce a leaflet?

A leaflet gives you a chance to put across your message and draw attention to events coming up like an election, the annual canvass or any electoral awareness activities you may have planned. A leaflet gives you the space to present your ideas clearly and with graphical impact. It also gives people a chance to take information home so they have more time to absorb to your message and to keep a visual reminder of it. Once distributed, the leaflet may end up being read by many more people that the person it was handed to, widening its impact.

Designing a leaflet - the basics

Leaflets are for delivering useful, reusable information. The size and shape of the leaflet is a major factor in its success. A leaflet that people can't fit easily into a pocket or a bag will be thrown away.

Take a piece of paper out of your printer. It should be A4. Now fold it in half, that's known as A5, now fold it in half again, that's what A6 looks like. Leaflets are normally created from a single sheet of paper, folded in half (to A5) or in three (to A6). Most leaflets start life as sheets of A4 paper - your design should also start there.

Also think about how much information you want on the leaflet. Well-written material will always enable people to make more informed judgments quickly. Don't cram it with text. People won't read it. Instead aim for clarity, strong argument and quality.

Designing a leaflet - step by step

When designing a leaflet, you are expressing yourself not only with words but also with pictures and graphics. How you present these pictures and graphics will contribute to the way readers perceive their importance.

There are six clear tasks in the creation of a leaflet:

1. Decide what you want to say

You must be clear in mind about the point you want to make. What is you overall concept? Though you have lots of space in a leaflet, you still want it to be clear and persuasive.

2. Text editing

Someone needs to write the text or choose bits of other people's text that are particularly effective and put these together to make up the text for your leaflet.

Remember, your text must be a) persuasive, b) interesting to read, and c) catchy and memorable. Format your text to make it punchy. Use short paragraphs and mark them with headings. Use bullet-pointed lists which are easy to read. You can pull out single lines and highlight them in a different font size or colour to make a strong point.

3. Picture design

Make sure your pictures help to get your message across. Commonly you might want to use a) pictures from official sources such as NGOs, b) pictures taken with a digital camera, c) stock photos or pictures downloaded from the internet, or d) powerful graphics such as graphs. Make sure you have permission to re-use these pictures for your leaflet though.

4. Layout design

The layout of your leaflet needs to be thought out very carefully. Work out what text and pictures you will have. Using a piece of plain paper sketch out:

where blocks of text will go
where headings will go
where pictures will go
how big the various bits will be

Try to think of colours for the text and background too. Remember text over images or large blocks of white text over a dark background are hard to read.

5. Make a booklet

Imagine an A5 leaflet. Effectively it has a front and back cover and a two page spread inside. The front cover lends itself to a single, powerful statement and a hard-hitting graphic to support the leaflet's title. These should be gripping enough to make anyone want to read on. On page two you can set out the problem: for instance, the low rates of voter turnout for young people. On page three, right opposite, you can explain what action people can take, such as registering to vote and how they can find out information about this - how, when and where.

Finally, on the back cover, tell us about yourself and your organisation. Don't forget to include contact details for people who want to know more or want to get involved. If you are working in association with another organisation, be sure to mention them. See if you can add their logo to your flyer. Their support will add authority to your efforts.

6. Printing

Your best bet will always be to give the job to a professional. Any printer will print, cut, and fold your leaflets and may even help you with design.

There are different ways to print things depending on how many leaflets you want to print. For small print runs of around 500 leaflets or less you might want to investigate printing your leaflet digitally. This means it will be printed on a high end colour photocopier and you can use as many colours as you like. For larger print runs you will want to print your leaflet offset which means it will be printed on a large printing press. If you are using this method, it is cheaper to print with one or two colours and more expensive to print in full colour.

Remember to get a least two or three quotations and you ask each printer to quote on exactly the same specifications so you can easily compare quotes.

Useful tools

Use our print specification template to help explain to printers what you would like them to quote on
You might also find this glossary of print terms useful

With thanks to Christian Aid for allowing us to adapt this material from their Pressureworks website