Vote for Policies: ‘And we’re live!’

After months of hard work and brilliant support from our community of users, crowd funders and supporters, Vote for Policies 2015 has gone live.

This post originally appeared on Vote for Policies.

We really look forward to hearing your feedback – please email us at feedback@voteforpolicies.org.uk.

At the launch party, founder Matt Chocqueel-Mangan talked about this being the beginning of an exciting journey towards a sustainable democracy. The first step towards accountability, is an engaged electorate and we’re making our way towards this by aiming to reach 5 million people before the election in May!

Our plans for the future include a service where we can track how parties have performed against what they have promised to do. We also have plans to make the service more accessible to those with lower literacy levels, English as a foreign language and other specific needs. We will continue to fundraise and are committed to helping as many people as possible to use the service and use their vote.

Party

Our launch party was mostly for those who bought tickets through our phenomenally successful crowd funding campaign in July. It was a brilliant night and great to meet so many of our supporters and well-wishers.

We had some fantastic speeches and the amazing Jake Yapp thrilled the audience with his rendition of the policies song he wrote for Radio 4, with a little help from us.

But of course, the thing we are most excited about today is that the new service is up and running and we can’t wait for you to have a go.

5 million

Now, in 2010, we set the service up to see if people would like it, and we didn’t have any number of users in mind – this time around, we have pledged to reach 5 million people! So, it is one heck of a mountain to climb and we will need all of you share links to the service like you’ve never shared before! It would really help if you shared links on social media and if you could go further, and email a school, university, your colleagues, for example, that would be amazing. Again, any ideas you have, please get in touch. We can always do with an extra pair of hands.

Chocqueel-Mangan added, “Our goal of reaching 5 million people is important, because if we even come close it could transform the political debate to focus around policies. Achieving this will give us the mandate create a service that tracks government performance against their manifesto pledges and report progress each year.

“This vital second part of the process will address the big issue of accountability, and encourage even more people to engage at the next election by showing them that policies really do matter – and so does voting. So this year we’re not just helping more people to vote, we’re paving the way for those that we know still won’t.” 

Finally, thank you to all of our 900 backers who pledged in the crowd funding campaign to make this a reality, and to the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust for match-funding your pledges. Thank you to UVD for building the service (we hope you agree, it looks fantastic), to our advisory board, and to all the policy folk at all the parties that helped with getting the policies to us on time for the launch. Policies will be updated once manifestos are released.

That’s it for now – we hope you enjoy voting for policies!

Photo: Khairil Zhafri via Flickr

Further reading:

If public vote for policies, not personalities, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage could lose

Vote for Policies crowdfunding to support ‘sustainable democracy’

If we voted for policies at elections, and not parties, the results might surprise us all

The people’s manifesto

The Guide to Sustainable Democracy 2014