OK. We’ll be honest. Like you, that took us by surprise. The file labelled ‘general election plan’ contained precisely nothing.
The prime minister had said there would be no snap election, and we believed her. As did our journalist colleagues at Politics.co.uk.
Well however mad or shrewd she may be, here we are just seven weeks away from polling day.
For those working in public affairs, this is a time both to be relished and dreaded in equal measure.
Relished because politics is your passion, this is what you do. Dreaded because you’ve just cancelled your holiday, you’d have liked just a tiny bit more notice, and for the CEO to believe you when you when you tell them that no-one, repeat no-one, saw this coming.
Well, here’s a bit of good news. You don’t need to give up on producing that constituency map, just because timescales are tight.
If you have key messages you want to communicate to parliamentary candidates through data, then PoliMapper offers a ready-made solution that can be up and running within a matter of days.
Equally PoliMapper can help if you want to flag data at constituency level about an issue to voters and ask them to write to their local candidates to check their stance on that issue.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, for example, uses PoliMapper to highlight issues surrounding poverty in each parliamentary constituency.
SAMH is similarly using PoliMapper to highlight issues around mental health by Local Authority in Scotland.
All we need from you to get PoliMapper up and running for your organisation is the data, whether it’s data you have collated or from publicly available sources such as ONS.
We can help you put the ‘map’ into the snap election.