Young people don't write to their MPs. We changed that.

How neu built a product used to help send over 70,000 emails to MPs, in under a week. www.exitbrex.it

Firstly, a bit of context. It's November 28th, 2018: The government has just released its report on the long term economic impact of Britain leaving the EU. In every scenario we are financially worse off outside of the EU. There is no consensus in Parliament on how to proceed. Parliament is becoming theatre and the political noise around Brexit is astonishing - but a handful of politicians are making it all, rather than the British people. Theresa May is whipping MPs to vote on her unpopular deal, urging them to vote 'in the interests of their constituents'.

But how do we, the constituents, let our MPs know what we think? Vote every 4 years? Hand write some letters? I can't remember the last time I bought a stamp. November 29th neu product manager Richard came into the the office frustrated and with an idea to make emailing your MP incredibly easy. If Theresa May wanted MPs to vote on behalf of their constituents - then we wanted to make sure those constituents had a say.

Richard's idea was simple - combine the tallying and social momentum of petitions with the direct-action of letter writing and wrap it all in a beautiful, easy-to-use interface. We wanted to create the easiest way to email your MP and tell them to exit Brexit. Side quest: flood the inboxes of Parliament and get this as-yet-unnamed app mentioned in the Commons.

Fast forward three weeks and we appeared in over 100 news articles, several radio interviews and helped over 70,000 people email their MPs.

OK - so how did we make that happen?





PRODUCT

1. Sending the email. Let's start with the user journey. Like every project - we put solving problems for the user front-and-centre.

As an apolitical organisation building in the political sphere - we were uniquely positioned to do this. Asking how our users voted in the referendum? Party allegiance? Age? Profession? They were all irrelevant.

Focusing on the user experience allowed us to confidently remove a lot of unnecessary fluff which other political products (i.e. notbuyingit.uk) consider important.

With simplicity in mind - the app would consist of two steps. 1. Find your MP and 2. Stop Brexit. Reductive but effective.

We sketched this out and in truth it was closer to 4 steps:

With the first click, the user would locate themselves to find their MP. With the second, they'd input their name and with the third they open their email client, prefilled with all the details to then send the email with the fourth click. Additional clicks to change the email subject and prewritten body were optional.





(special mention to postcodes.io, which allowed us to both find a postcode from a coordinate (if the user had geolocated) and also find the constituency for any given UK postcode.)

(very special mention to Wire for their tremendous support, copywriting and press wizardry. More on them later.)

It was also important that these emails came directly from constituents inboxes, rather than our server - we wouldn't send a single email. It would be impossible to spam-censor the emails, or ignore them.

Regarding whether our design approach was successful, we defer to user Deirdre O'Halloran

2. Driving momentum. We solved the mechanics of creating an incredibly easy way to email MPs, but with a marketing budget of £0 - we needed to come up with creative solutions to spread the app organically. Our approach to this was two-pronged:

Dynamic send counts.

One of the compelling elements of petitions is their dynamic counting. As a signatory you get that sense of being part of something, and validation from how many others have done it. We wanted to have two counts - one for the overall number of emails sent, and one per-MP. The MP counts were useful whether high, or low. On one hand - the counts celebrated instances where lots of emails had sent, but they were also useful for stoking fire in constituencies with low numbers.

Versus

887 to Alison Thewliss, Glasgow Central

683 to Stewart McDonald, Glasgow South

661 to Deidre Brock, Edinburgh North and Leith

561 to Thangam Debbonaire, Bristol West

The counts gave users reason to come back, as well as hang out on the site to see the number creep up. At one point we had an email emoji fly across the screen for every email sent... but within hours of going live the 📧📧📧 tide got too much.

These counts closely tied in with the second prong of our momentum strategy:

Social Engagement.

Where there is an MP, there is a Twitter handle (well, almost). Twitter is where the news breaks, it enjoys a special relationship with politics and is able to disseminate information incredibly quickly. Twitter knew that December 10th's 'meaningful vote' was cancelled before most of the Conservative party. We chose to focus our efforts there. As well as hitting MP's inboxes - could we flood their Twitter?

No one clicks share buttons. Driving organic sharing relies on quality, relatable content. We wanted to give users something of value to shout about. So after sending the email, we generated a dynamic tweet celebrating the number of emails sent, @ linking their MP:

"I'm the Xth person to email @MPHandle to tell them to exit this Brexit madness. www.exitbrex.it @exitbrex_it #exitbrexit"

Our social strategy evolved after launch, but more on that later.





CONTENT

Look & feel

The brand assets quickly came together during the early phases of development. Subtle (ish...) references to the EU colour pallet and flag were wrapped in a simple, fun user interface. It was distinctly contemporary, light and felt good. The use of emojis and colour kept things celebratory and optimistic.

Time constraints meant we had to come up with a name quickly - ExitBrexit was bounced around and we never looked back.

Letter to MPs

... For two years, the U.K. Government has tried – and failed – to deliver on Brexit.

Their uncertainty and lack of governance has wasted more than time. It has wasted jobs, opportunity, the value of the pound, investment and our international reputation.

This decline will continue, unless we exit Brexit. ...

A few days into the 5-day build we told some friends what we were doing, and they got excited. We partnered with the brilliant Wire to write the MP letter and provide press support for the app's launch. The app's tone might have been optimistic, but the letter being sent to MPs was anything but. You can read it in full on the second page of the site (Published Dec 11 2018).





LAUNCH

Up to this point, about 5 days have past. That's concepting, designing, building, deploying and testing the app. We also had our photos taken.

Wire sent out a PR blast complete with serious-yet-approachable photos of Grant (neu founder) & Richard (product manager). Any stories were embargoed until midnight that day. We put the app on Product Hunt and shared it amongst our personal networks. Early users started to trickle in, generally focused around Scotland.

That's about as far as our 'launch plan' went. We finished the first afternoon with 787 emails sent. A reminder at this point that this was individual constituents emails their MPs from their own email address - not our server pinging them out.

Thanks to the hard work of Wire, the app's launch was covered by over 100 news outlets. ITV News, Yahoo, The Metro, Mail Online, The New European, The Drum, Heart radio and tonnes more ran stories on it.

We had a few pretty big accounts tweet about it early on and momentum started to build. At this stage exitbrex.it didn't have a Twitter account of its own, so we quickly made one. We followed a lot of MPs and were banned just as quickly under suspicion of being a bot. A friend at Twitter had our account ban lifted, but for much of the first 24hrs we were in read-only mode.

Following the PR blast, we finished the second day at 5,000 emails.

One of the great things about digital products is that they are dynamic, changeable, and responsive. We noticed patterns in user behaviour and built features to cater to these. One example was seeing users share screenshots of the app in Instagram stories. We added a feature to the congratulations screen which auto-generated a custom image to share.

We were also able to respond to political events - adding and almost immediately scoring out a countdown to the cancelled Dec 10th 'meaningful vote'. This later became a countdown to the Article 50 deadline.

5,000 emails was a little disappointing, but it was the starting point of a two-week campaign across Twitter and the exitbrex.it site to react, build features and create content driving momentum.

The two weeks following the launch were politically a mess of cancelled votes, public anger, failed Brexiter coups and the first time in history that a UK government was found in contempt of Parliament. Suffice it to say we were glued to twitter and able to capitalise on a lot of it. We created dynamic content for Twitter in response to how the campaign was going and political movements.

5,000 became 32,000 4 days later with several MPs tweeting about us. A week later, we hit 70,000 emails. Then Parliament had its Christmas break, and so did we.

And the sidequest we set at the beginning?

... get this as-yet-unnamed app mentioned in the Commons.

Mission accomplished.

+71,000xp





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