After months of hard work and brilliant support from our community of users, crowd funders and supporters, Vote for Policies 2015 has gone live.
We really look forward to hearing your feedback – please email us at [email protected].
At the launch party last night, 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
Last night’s 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.
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!