This is only Meta ads, though, isn't it? The Greens seem to have spent a significant portion of their entire budget that way, whereas, say, Labour and the Conservatives spent a tiny proportion of their budget on Meta. I suspect Reform also spent a small amount off their total budget that way.
Meta (Facebook) is as crucial for election advertising as primetime TV advertising used to be. I don't know about proportions, but this is an important expense.
It is, but by the looks of it, the Greens spent around about 50% of their national budget on it, whereas Labour and the Conservatives probably only about 5% (although that's hard to estimate yet).
Not the point I know, but it also neatly illustrates why the electoral commission’s harshest penalties don’t really worry the likes of Ref0rm 🤬
If they can afford to spunk that sort of cash on advertising then a few thousand here and there for the odd transgression isn’t going to bother them.
Suspect that's in part due to different reasons.
Reform and Greens don't have great traditional campaign infrastructure/expertise and so social media is more effective.
LDs don't do SM well but have very clear preference on staff and leaflets. They also don't have much £.
I disagree on the Greens front. They've been quietly building up campaign infrastructure over the last few years. In their target seats they had literally hundreds of people going out doorknocking and leafleting in the last few weeks.
The Greens were the only ones we saw in our area (Mark Harper MP, as was).
Battlebus (motor caravan) and supporters in town centre. Admittedly, this was about noon on election day. There were a few posters in Harper’s office window, but Labour ended up on top (just).
Yeah, that result in Forest of Dean looks like a plausible Green target for next time (I don’t work with them, no insider information, not a member etc, just fond of them)
Only got around 4K votes this time. Greens are in the majority (since 2023) on FoD Council, after Ind.
But it, like most District councils, doesn’t do a lot. Recycling arrangement here is currently, er, rubbish - won’t take any plastic other than bottles.
Yeah, but council seats and a 4K votes is kind of what they built from in those four targets this year. And FoD seems natural territory for them (to me, someone who’s been there at least twice).
Well I am happy to concede I'm wrong, I was basing this on my local Greens, who do not. They are not bad campaigners but they do use social media ads a lot more than say leaflets. They also don't have a canvass management software/database
In their target seats they really acted like a proper campaigning organisation. Canvass managing software, big ground game, get out the vote targeting. All that jazz.
Yeah, they should be getting a fair amount, especially compared to previous elections. They really seem to be preparing for the future and I wish them well.
I can only speak for the Scottish Greens here, but suspect it applies to the Green Party too - branch capacity for campaigning varies a *lot*. Up here, the Glasgow lot have local councillors and hundreds of feet on the ground for campaigning. In my rural constituency, we have 10 people...
Probably not. I don't think a party can accept free services from companies, they have to declare them as donations & election expenses. If you look on the donations site there's stuff declared like "£148.70: Madge's catering company".
Possibly. But then you've got both constituency pages and individual candidate pages. I'm not saying someone hasn't checked about 2000 pages and then worked out what was spent on each during the campaign but.. what a balls-ache that'd be in such a short time! Plus they only give ranges often.
Cool! Still must have been a balls ache to find them all! I added a few of the finalised constituency candidate lists to the open source candidate database thing and there were loads without FB/constituency FB info. Bravo them for finding them all!!
Open source Devs can be the bees knees! There are some great data projects on GitHub. It's a shame they also include folks writing AI chatbots for scammers
