Lib Dems embrace IT collaboration tool

Huddle allows horizontal rather than vertical communication

Liberal Democrats take on Huddle

The Liberal Democrats improved the ability of party workers and campaigners to communicate with each other in the run-up to the general election by implementing Huddle, a web-based collaboration tool.

The Party’s existing systems for communicating with members were not up to the job, said Liberal Democrats web and e-communications technology manager Sam Lockwood: “Our existing extranet was struggling to cope with the volume of documentation that we needed to put on there, and aside from that we were using email and clogging up people’s inboxes with a lot of information.”

The dispersed nature of the organisation made communication a particular challenge. “We had a lot of local-level groups, lots of branches and committees, and we really needed something that would allow us to deploy file-sharing and collaboration tools to a highly distributed audience,” said Lockwood. Huddle, a hosted web-based service, fitted the bill, and was implemented six months before the general election in May.

More than 1,500 Liberal Democrats now use Huddle to collaborate, and in the run-up to the general election there were more than 46,500 document viewings in the party’s online workspaces.

Lockwood said the system had provided the Party with “palpable efficiency and process improvement”, adding: “The largest change is in terms of getting people talking to each other on a horizontal rather than a vertical broadcast basis such as email. Working groups and committees are able to place all their communications and documentation in one place as opposed to having to send round-robin emails and have their files stored on various machines in different places.”

MPs and prospective parliamentary candidates had derived particular benefit from being able to access Huddle from mobile phones, said Lockwood: “Previously they couldn’t access their policy briefings on mobile devices. The fact that Huddle is available on their smartphones was a huge bonus to them – as they were out campaigning around the country, they were able to access those policy documents on the go.”

Although Huddle had mainly been used for sharing files, party workers and activists are now starting to use other functionality, said Lockwood: “Things such as the ability to share tasks, the approval processes and the audit trail are all really useful to specific groups that may not have been using things like that before.”