Shelter is one of the most recognisable charities in England, with a clear purpose to defend everyone’s right to a safe home.

Ahead of the 2024 General Election, it was vital for Shelter to begin building relationships with prospective MPs to ensure that housing was high on the new government’s agenda.

Shelter, in partnership with Ikea, wanted to use Polimapper to paint a picture of levels of homelessness in each constituency in England, and drive supporters towards a candidate email action.

Homelessness data is published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government at a local authority level.

To provide a tool for the General Election, it was necessary to map local authority boundaries to the new constituency boundaries that took effect once an election was called.

We used GIS software to establish the largest local authority district (lower tier council) in each parliamentary constituency. For example in the constituency of South West Hertfordshire the overlapping local authority is Three Rivers district council. We then used the MHCLG data and displayed the figures for children in temporary accommodation, people recorded as homeless and people on the social housing waiting list. 

As the project was primarily focused on generating conversions, the decision was taken to remove the heatmap aspect and focus on a user journey that involved entering a postcode, navigating to the constituency and emailing their candidates.

The email-to-candidate action drew on our extensive database of more than 3,000 prospective parliamentary candidates and their associated contact details.

The postcode search used a bespoke Polimapper database created by mapping postcodes to new parliamentary constituencies using GIS software, as an official database was not available at the time the tool was built.

Emails were tailored for each constituency, using local datapoints to provide candidates with an email specifically pertaining to their future constituency.

Shelter’s email-to-candidate action was published on the day the general election was announced – they were the first major UK charity to go live with such an action, and this achievement was a reward for months of hard work by both Shelter and Polimapper.

Over the course of the general election campaign, the action generated 12,667 emails to prospective candidates.

3,336 individual candidates were contacted across all 543 constituencies in England.

The work that we did with Polimapper went down incredibly well internally and with our relationship with Ikea; it really bolstered it. 

It also created opportunities for working more closely with other partnerships on campaigning. 

We chose Polimapper because they provided the best dataset of PPCs we could find.

Our objective was to reach every single constituency and do our best to get housing issues and homelessness on the map.

It was a huge success. It had exactly the impact that we wanted it to.

We reached every constituency in England with local homelessness data being sent to every single PPC, with clear asks around supporting the building of social housing, fixing renting and ending homelessness. We got good feedback from both PPCs (via constituents sending us their replies) and from supporters saying it was a simple and easy to use platform.

Polimapper were flexible and easy to work with. We have very good accessibility requirements and wanted to make a lot of changes. Polimapper were really accommodating to help us do this.