‘Hyperlocal messaging can help Labour win elections: Here’s how’ – LabourList

Local elections are tough. Turnout is low. National issues dominate.

Many voters feel local politicians can’t make a difference and often use their vote to send a message about Westminster instead. Yet what we saw in Warwickshire this year told a different story.

Despite national headwinds and a large Conservative majority, we ran a hyperlocal campaign – and increased Labour’s vote share more than anywhere else in the county. We beat Reform and cut the Tory majority from 31% to 8%.

When bad news lands in the middle of the election period, it can seem like nothing works but we’ve seen that good campaigning still matters. The candidates who connect locally can still win. The key question becomes: how do we do this?

‘Hyperlocal’ messages beat ‘Local’ messages

I’m part of Campaign Lab whose main goal is to answer this question. Campaign Lab is a volunteer-driven network of academics, technologists, and campaigners who want to accelerate progressive politics and build a culture of experimentation. We run experiments to test what actually works in real campaigns.

Through these experiments, one defining message that shines through is that ‘Local’ messages beat ‘National’ messages but ‘Hyperlocal’ messages beat ‘Local’ messages.

To show how this works, let’s take healthcare as an example. The ‘National’ healthcare message is that Labour has delivered 3.6 million additional NHS appointments. That’s impressive, but too abstract for most voters.

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To make the message ‘Local’, I could research how waiting times have been reduced in Warwick Hospital, find data to support this, then put this ‘Local’ number on a leaflet. But to really make the message impactful and ‘Hyperlocal’, I can take a photo outside of the ward’s local medical centre, find statistics on its waiting times and use this ‘Hyperlocal‘ information in literature. 

Better yet, sometimes it’s about starting with the local rather than the national. We saw the impact of this clearly in an early experiment using leaflets that were addressed to each home in my ward of Bishop’s Tachbrook. Two key issues were affecting residents in the area: speeding around a primary school and a lack of amenities in a new build estate.

I created a leaflet that mentioned both issues and two QR codes – one for each issue. Each leaflet was unique to the household. We distributed these leaflets to 900 households and around 66 QR codes were scanned (a scan rate of 7%, almost double the industry average of 4%). The pattern was clear: residents had only scanned QR codes relating to issues located within 100 metres of their home. By making our literature ‘Hyperlocal’, we had successfully connected with residents on issues that mattered to them.

Consistency is just as important

Hyperlocal was the pillar of our strategy in the recent 2025 May local elections, where I managed the campaign for our Warwickshire County Council candidate for the division of Budbrooke & Bishop’s Tachbrook. 

We focused on five key areas — with tailored events and hyperlocal literature for each, using evidence from previous Campaign Lab trials to inform the literature we created. 

In the 2024 general election, Campaign Lab found in a randomised trial that distributing postcards to residents increased Labour turnout by 2% (while having no effect on Conservative turnout). Based on this data, we produced postcards for each of the five target areas featuring high-quality photographs of a local church, estate, or landscape, and a scanned, hand-written message from our candidate, Jenny Bevan, on the reverse.

Each postcard was individually addressed and distributed to all Labour voters and undecideds in each area. The response was immediate and memorable. People stopped Jenny on the doorstep to thank her. One said, “This is the nicest photo I’ve ever had of my home.” Unlike most leaflets, they weren’t thrown away – they were kept. They created emotional connection.

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Alongside the print campaign, we also ran a significant ‘Hyperlocal’ digital campaign. Across many local Facebook groups, our candidate posted regular news updates and our leaflets to reach out to voters in those areas.

We ran Facebook and Instagram adverts targeted at specific locations, with some delivering strong returns on investment. One of our adverts saw 16,661 impressions and cost £40.45 to place, which equates to more than 400 impressions per £1 spent.

We combined this with face-to-face presence. Jenny held café drop-ins, joined chair yoga classes, debated farmers in pubs and stayed visible throughout the campaign. If national politics hadn’t been so challenging, I believe we’d have won. All this points to one thing: hyperlocal works.

Beyond this, we have seen some evidence that consistency is just as important as running a strong local campaign. In areas where we’d never campaigned before, even the best hyperlocal leaflets could only go so far.  But in Bishop’s Tachbrook, a ward where we have a consistent presence, we won all the polling boxes with increased margins. In Barford, a village where we historically had a strong presence, we also won the village’s polling box.

Campaign Lab’s mission is to build a culture of experimentation, and while some progress has been made, there is still much to learn. If you’re a campaigner and you’re keen to help the mission, do reach out and work with the network to run experiments in your areas. Campaign Lab has recently developed a Deep Canvassing method that we’re trialling in areas with strong Reform risk.

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Campaign Labbers have a bank of tools from precise social media targeting for your ward to a SamplingApp that allows you to sample at speed and analyse live data during the count. Recently we’ve also launched a new library to collect and share insights from across electoral and progressive campaigns.

Politics can sometimes feel distant, but hyperlocal campaigning literally brings it right back to your doorstep. We’ve shown that when the campaign focuses on what’s happening just around the corner (instead of what’s being argued about in Westminster), voters genuinely tune in. ‘National’ trends are tough to overcome, but nothing sparks conversation like speeding near your kid’s school or the potholes on your street.

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