I've spent a lot of time trying to understand what politics looks like when you stop starting from Westminster and start from people's everyday lives. Between 2014 and 2024 the proportion of people with low or no trust in MPs rose from 54% to 76% and my working theory is that trust isn't rebuilt through one big act but thousands of small ones, most of them local. People engage with issues they can see from their window: in our QR code leaflet tests, 92% of school-petition scans came from households within 400m of the school, and 72% of shop-consultation scans from within 100m of the proposed site. Campaign Lab research also found links to local newspapers are shared five times more in local Facebook groups than links to national news. The local level is where abstract politics becomes tangible.

Through Campaign Lab we've built infrastructure for working at this level: a register of local Facebook groups by constituency, social listening on community conversations, and analysis of how issues emerge and travel through local digital spaces, from Facebook groups and Nextdoor to community WhatsApps.

The framework we use for turning all this into strategy is Listen → Act → Communicate.

Listen through casework clustering, local groups, local news and petition data to find what's actually salient (distinguishing quick reactive wins (flytipping on George Street) from long-term proactive work (the stalled hospital)).

Act by choosing concrete actions over abstract campaigns, scored against target relevance, resource, achievability and salience.

Communicate by closing the loop with the specific people the action mattered to, through the channels they already use, ideally via endorsers because it's always better when someone else says you're good than when you say it yourself.

The step everyone forgets is the third one: plenty of good local work happens and nobody ever hears about it.

I can help fellows think about questions like: How do people experience politics outside election periods? How do local identities shape issue salience? How do you design interventions that feel genuinely local rather than nationally templated? And how do you build the listening infrastructure (human and technical) that makes any of this systematic rather than accidental?