City of London
Engaging voters and companies for truly inclusive elections in London.
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The City of London is home to the world’s oldest continuous local democracy - and despite occupying a little over a square mile, has enormous global historical, cultural, and economic significance. In addition to approximately 10,000 residents, the City is home to many of the world’s most important businesses and around half a million people work there each day. Due to its varied community, the City has a unique franchise, which allows workers as well as residents to participate in its local elections. The pandemic and ongoing remote working have created barriers to engagement and voter registration among City workers in particular, with overall registration having fallen from 19,000 in 2020 to 13,000 in 2021. In addition, a complex system in which many workers must be registered to vote by their company is often poorly understood by those eligible to participate. Tectonica leveraged our experience engaging voters and mobilising to help the City’s government reach out to eligible voters, their businesses, and achieve a more diverse slate of candidates.
As part of our work to increase electoral participation, we combined strategy and technology to build a truly innovative website. Speak for the City is an online platform we created which:
- Educates the public about their voting rights and engages them in the process while making companies aware of their responsibility to register their workers,
- Includes a tool to automatically connect workers with their companies through The City of London to request registration,
- Visually lays out the steps to be taken by registrants in helping non-resident voters access the franchise,
- Segments site visitors by voter type and allows individual voters to check the status of their company, and
- Encourages people to stand as a candidate for local elected office and provides some guidance on the process and eligibility.
In addition to the game-changing nature of the engagement tool represented by the site, the involvement of Tectonica’s in-house design team allowed for a visual identity to be synchronised with the development of strategy and web design. We provided the City of London with a distinctive visual language for their platform (led by the impossible-to-miss dragon), rolling out graphic design and continuous creative services to allow them to reach as wide as possible a range of voters and candidates.
Speak for the City’s innovative tools combine with its easy functionality and distinctive visual design to create an unprecedented mechanism by which The City of London can engage constituents, which will help them to hold a truly inclusive election that accurately represents the will of all eligible voters.
While the final figure is still being finalised at the point of writing, with the help of Tectonica, the City of London electorate has returned to its pre-pandemic level of approximately 19,000 voters.
