Winning Votes With TYPO3: A Guide to Content Management for Political Parties
How Political Parties can use TYPO3 to win elections
Political campaigns are characterized by their intensity. With the stakes high and the opportunity to shape public affairs being the prize for a successful electoral result, parties roll out comprehensive messaging strategies to gain visibility, shape public discourse, and ultimately win over voters’ support. In recent decades, the digital field has become an increasingly important battleground for the hearts and minds of voters, with political parties leaving no stone unturned in order to effectively communicate their vision for the future.
A CMS for Political Campaigns
With the party seeking to enhance its digital presence, it turned to Prater Raines, a UK based web development agency, to create a website that would streamline communication between regional offices and their constituents, handle petition signups, and improve revenue generation among other key objectives.
The Liberal Democrats benefitted from the same core features and capabilities that make TYPO3 an appealing option for organizations in this field. In this piece, using the Liberal Democrats success as an example, we’ll look into how future parties can benefit from TYPO3’s feature set to succeed.
Improving the Digital Presence of a Major Political Party
The Liberal Democrats were founded in 1988 as the successor to the Liberal Party, the oldest party in the UK. Currently the third largest party in the UK parliament, as of the 2024 election where they won 72 seats, the party maintains a federated structure, comprising three state parties and several regional and local parties along with other associated organizations, and more than 100,000 members across the UK.
With the party seeking to enhance its digital presence, it turned to Prater Raines, a UK based web development agency, to create a website that would streamline communication between regional offices and their constituents, handle petition signups, and improve revenue generation among other key objectives.
Manage local and regional party sites with TYPO3
With effective communication and synchronization of initiatives needed across national, regional, and local levels, political parties require a content management system that’s multisite capable.
TYPO3’s page-tree architecture enables organizations to easily manage independent branches with separate frontend outputs through a common backend. The CMS also provides granular access controls, meaning that access can be granted to specific pages and parts of the backend, with user rights being limited to relevant pages.
For political parties like the Liberal Democrats, whose teams include a wide array of contributors, from content writers, to campaign managers, and regional officials, this means simplified workflows and increased security.
Engage Voters with a Multilingual Functionality
One of TYPO3’s most well known features is its multilingual capabilities. TYPO3’s out-of-the-box core supports over 50 languages, negating the need for third-party extensions. It also offers useful page translation tools, ensuring that organizations can speak to their audience in its mother tongue, with accurate content localization that allows for messages to stay consistent and accurate regardless of the language they’re shared in.
For political parties, this is an essential feature, and in the UK, where regional languages in places like Wales hold official status, it means that content is accessible to a wider audience.
Data Management with TYPO3 Integrations
While TYPO3 does possess a robust core feature offering, integrations and custom extensions serve an important purpose in improving overall performance and expanding a site’s functionality.
These were key areas of operations for the Prater Raines team as they worked with the Liberal Democrats to achieve the party’s goals.
Some of the main integrations included one that effectively gathered volunteer records from non-TYPO3 websites and sent it to the party main site where it was data-matched, allowing campaigners to access volunteer information in minutes.
Furthermore, the website’s member signup field and petition forms, and party contact fields used APIs to transfer data to third-party systems like Salesforce, securely passing information to relevant party officials as they geared up for local and regional events and future elections.
Full Compliance with TYPO3
The Lib Dems sought a CMS that met strong compliance requirements, including data security regulations and honest cookie consent. Additionally, accessibility standards were an important consideration, most notably for bilingual constituents in Wales the party hoped to engage with. TYPO3’s out-of-the-box compliance features ensure that all requirements are met. Its regular maintenance and upgrade cycles also ensure that new versions incorporate any future regulations, allowing for complete compliance.
One of the key benefits of choosing an open source CMS is cost-effectiveness, with organizations avoiding being tied in to lengthy licensing agreements, including hidden fees, and the potential of access to data being limited once a contract runs out.
As an open source CMS, TYPO3 is free to download, and doesn’t have any up-front costs, meaning that it's a cost effective solution for political parties like the Liberal Democrats who operate on a budget.
Choosing a Scalable CMS
Ideally suited for large-scale organizations operating websites with extensive content production and data sets, TYPO3 has been used by public sector organizations ranging from ministries to universities. Capable of supporting projects with over one million content items without sacrificing performance, the CMS is ideally suited for political parties seeking to manage federal and local sites through one backend.
Hosting Hundreds of Websites on One TYPO3 Backend
The Liberal Democrats launched their new website, with the Federal site going live in December 2022 and local sites in January 2023. Since then, the party has grown to hosting over 320 sites on their TYPO3 instance, with the CMS effectively handling large spikes in traffic such as that in the run-up to the 2024 parliamentary elections.
Conclusion
In the political arena, effective communications and a reliable web presence are key factors that enable successful campaigns. TYPO3’s feature offering provides political parties a capable solution to allow them to grow their visibility, connect with voters and get their message across.
The success of the Liberal Democrats website, with the support of Prater Raines is a testament to TYPO3’s suitability for this use case.
Did you win your election and are now heading to public office? Learn more about how TYPO3 empowers public sector organizations.
