Hannah O’Rourke

Most good work dies in an inbox. People spend weeks on a project, a proposal or an idea, and then thirty seconds on the message that's supposed to get someone to engage with it. Getting things in front of people is a genuine skill and one you can learn.

I've spent years operating in ecosystems where nobody has to reply to you: MPs, funders, journalists, party staff, senior volunteers, busy organisers. I can help fellows with the practical craft of cut-through: writing emails people actually answer, WhatsApps that get a response rather than a "seen", subject lines, timing, length, asks that are easy to say yes to, and knowing when a message should be a call instead. This also includes the wider game of visibility, how to warm someone up before you ask, when to use an intermediary, how to follow up without being annoying, and how to make your work legible to people with no time.

I can help fellows think about questions like: Why is nobody replying to me? What's the actual ask here? Who should this come from? How do I get my project in front of the person who can act on it?

Political communication increasingly isn’t just about having the strongest message, it’s about understanding how information moves. I’m interested in the relationship between message, messenger, medium and distribution: why some political ideas spread while others disappear, why the same message lands differently depending on who delivers it, and how platforms shape what people see, trust and act on. Most political actors obsess over the first and neglect the other three which is usually why their ideas disappear.

Some things I've learned from testing this in practice:

• Messenger often beats message. In our crowdsourced message testing, the most persuasive messages came from people who shared demographics and political history with the audience, not from professional comms people. In our pilot work distributing broadcast clips into Reform-adjacent spaces, a named, working-class trade unionist's account outperformed an anonymous "in-group" account on every metric — roughly 5x the views — while avoiding the platform bans that killed the anonymous ones. Authenticity is a distribution strategy, not just a virtue.
• Distribution Mechanics that grab attention are different depending on what platform you are on. If you want something to grab attention on TikTok you might make a very short video with a shocking hook. If you want to grab attention in a whatsapp group locally, asking a question and telling a "gossip like" story is way more effective.
• Proximity drives salience. Ads featuring local candidates consistently beat national politicians; in one pilot, everyone who scanned a QR code on a leaflet lived within 1km of the local issue it discussed. People pay attention to politics that is recognisably theirs.

Through my work across campaigns, organising, experimentation and political technology, I’ve explored how political attention forms in practice , from local Facebook groups and messaging apps to campaign content, community networks and conversational spaces. I can help fellows think about questions like: How do people actually encounter politics today? When does messenger matter more than message? How do platform incentives shape behaviour? Why do some issues suddenly become politically salient? How do trust and legitimacy get built online? And how do you design political interventions that create participation rather than simply visibility?

I’m particularly interested in moving beyond broadcast models of politics towards understanding politics as something relational and distributed, built through networks, conversations, repeated interactions and trusted messengers rather than centralised communication alone.

A lot of political and organisational problems are not really persuasion problems, they're legitimacy problems. People often know what needs to happen but disagree on who gets to decide, whether the process was fair, or whether they trust the people leading it. I'm interested in how legitimacy gets constructed in practice: through participation, transparency, shared ownership, evidence and creating processes people recognise as fair. Following Martin Conway, I treat legitimacy as historically contingent, socially constructed and contested — the interesting question is never "is this legitimate?" but "how did it become legitimate, and why then?"

For example, the covid memorial was not legitimate but it was made so. This was done by making sure the first volunteers wore flouresent jackets, had a sign put up and by the afternoon multiple front bench politicians had visited it. Then the council accepted it and paid for its upkeep as a historic memorial. Its legitimacy was constructed. Technically everyone could have been arrested for criminal damage.

Another example in the #Honourtheoffer campaign which was crearting legitimacy through organising information. When Oxford alumni felt colleges weren't honouring their access commitments, the concern was fragmented across dozens of colleges with decentralised decision-making, which meant if one fell, they all would. A hashtag gave people shared language and over 8,000 signed the petition, but the pivotal move was mundane: a public spreadsheet listing every college against its commitments, updated openly and pitting them against each other. The spreadsheet didn't just record reality, it organised it and whoever structures the information becomes trusted to interpret it. League tables, polling and Wikipedia all work this way.

Across my work I’ve repeatedly operated in environments where authority is fragmented such as campaigns, parties, community groups, MPs’ offices, networks and coalitions. I can help fellows think about questions like: How do you make decisions people will actually follow? How do you create buy-in without formal power? How do you design participation that is meaningful rather than performative? How do you create legitimacy for new technologies or organisational change?

• Martin Conway https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/publication/213503/manual

A lot of people understand UK politics formally but not operationally. I can help fellows understand where decisions actually get made: the relationship between parties, MPs, special advisers, local government, campaigns, funders, members, parliamentary structures and informal networks.

My background includes working in parliament, running Labour Together, convening election review processes and spending years operating between campaigns, think tanks and politicians. That means I can help translate abstract questions (“How do you influence Labour?” “Who matters?” “What does Parliament actually do?”) into practical strategy. I’ve run sessions on navigating UK political systems, identifying pressure points and understanding the difference between formal constitutional power and real-world political leverage.

Politics rarely works the way the diagram says it does. A lot of strategy is understanding timing, relationships, legitimacy, incentives and institutional rhythms.

One of the things I spend a lot of time helping people with is moving from “this is unfair” to “this is changeable”. Political systems often look impossible until you identify where decisions, incentives and coordination failures actually sit.

I can help fellows map systems and identify leverage: who controls implementation, who shapes narratives, where informal veto points exist, where legitimacy matters, and where small interventions create outsized effects. This includes practical tools for actor mapping, coalition design, identifying hidden decision-makers, sequencing campaigns and understanding institutional incentives. I’ve run sessions that focus less on ideology and more on operational politics: how things move in practice.

I can help fellows think through different routes to change: insider versus outsider strategies, coalition building, narrative pressure, institutional entrepreneurship, campaigning around moments of opportunity and understanding how influence accumulates. This includes practical questions like: Who needs persuading? What kind of evidence matters? When should you campaign publicly versus privately? How do you build influence without formal authority?

I’m particularly interested in helping people understand that lobbying is rarely just meetings, it’s often about creating conditions where a decision becomes easier to take.

A lot of civic and political technology fails because it solves an imagined problem rather than a real one. Through Campaign Lab and product experimentation I’ve spent years thinking about how political tools get adopted and why they usually don’t.

I can help fellows move from idea → user → workflow → adoption → scale. That includes discovery, prototyping, testing in live environments and designing for exhausted campaigners rather than ideal users. All too often technologists want to create perfect solutions and go through extended processes involving lots of user time and energy. When this approach meets politics it often fails.

I’m particularly interested in questions like: Why do organisers abandon tools? How do products fit into existing workflows? When should you build versus adapt? How do you know if a product is creating value? When should you work with partners to embed something?

One of the more unusual areas I can support on is understanding MPs’ offices as organisations. Through our research and practical work we’ve looked at how MPs’ offices actually function — workflows, staffing, onboarding, technology, leadership, casework, decision making and institutional constraints. They are the hidden infrastructure of UK democracy: 650 effectively independent micro-organisations, employing over 3,500 staff at a public cost of around £200m a year, and for most citizens the primary point of contact with the state when something goes wrong. Yet they are barely researched, and nobody — not MPs, not Parliament, not the parties — has a clear picture of what a high-performing office would even look like.

Through the Parliament Workflow Study (convened by Campaign Lab and Newspeak House), I co-authored Democracy on Default Settings with Edward Saperia, published by Demos in 2026 and based on fieldwork, interviews and surveys with staffers across all parties. Some of what we found: 73% of staff had no written guidance or handbook for how their office runs; offices recruited for 89 different job titles in a single year; MPs collectively purchased over 275 different software tools since 2020 (including 34 different video editors) while barely 1% claimed for any AI tool; and staff described the job as a "fourth emergency service", absorbing casework that should sit with councils and public services, often without training or mental health support. The pattern throughout is offices running on default settings — personalised, reactive, and dependent on individual heroics rather than institutional design. Ahead of the historic 2024 intake of 335 new MPs, we also produced a comprehensive MP office manual, now hosted on W4MP.

What makes this interesting beyond Parliament is that MPs' offices are a perfect case study in why good ideas fail to get adopted: fragmented authority, restrictive central IT, no shared standards, high turnover destroying institutional memory, and a monopoly casework tool with no competitive pressure to improve. If you can understand how to change an MP's office, you understand something general about institutional reform.

I can help fellows understand questions like: What is an MP's office actually optimised for? How does constituency representation really work, and where are the bottlenecks? Why does £200m of democratic infrastructure run on spreadsheets and WhatsApp? What would better infrastructure look like, and who would have to act to build it? I've run practical sessions on office operations, and this is especially useful for anyone interested in democracy, public institutions, civic products or state capacity.

Most political innovation dies because people either over-build or never test. A lot of my work has been about creating practical ways to experiment inside campaigns and institutions with limited time, money and appetite for risk building evidence rather than anecdotes, and adapting experimentation methods to the constraints of UK politics (short campaigns, small budgets, electoral law, nervous stakeholders).

Through Campaign Lab I've helped run what we believe is the largest political RCT in UK history, 101,600 households across 8 constituencies, analysing data from over 600,000 electors, and the first RCT ever run during a UK General Election. But some of the most useful lessons come from smaller, scrappier tests, and especially from the surprises:

• Null results are findings too. Another mailer RCT found neither locally nor nationally framed issue leaflets moved turnout at all — knowledge that saves campaigns real money on print runs that don't work.
• Cheap observational tests can be surprisingly revealing. A 900-leaflet QR code pilot got a 7.3% scan rate (nearly double the industry average) and showed that 25 of 27 school-petition scans came from within 400m of the school — hyperlocal relevance driving engagement, mapped street by street.
• Experiments often tell your something unexpected. A petition RCT with 28,000 supporters found explicit personalisation lifted signing by 2.5 points — but asking supporters to recruit others did nothing, because just 4% of people generated all the peer recruitment. Relational campaigning strategies built on "everyone shares" quietly fail.

I can help fellows think about how to run a political experiments: choosing hypotheses, defining success, running pilots, evaluating outcomes and deciding whether something should scale. This includes campaign messaging tests, organising interventions, behavioural experiments, tool adoption and operational workflow changes. I’m particularly interested in helping people build evidence rather than anecdotes and in adapting experimentation methods to the constraints of UK politics.

My starting point is that conflict is not a failure state: conflicts are necessary to politics, inevitable, and in fact creative. Politics is the reconciliation of paradox — it doesn't deny differences, it holds them. And conflict isn't always anger; often the worst kind is stuckness, a cycle of stasis and indecision. Most governance systems were built precisely to get unstuck: the Labour rule book exists because trade unionists and middle-class intellectuals with limited communications had to coordinate through enormous disagreement.

Over the years I've collected a toolkit of approaches beyond voting for resolving conflict and stuckness — getting concrete about interests rather than fighting at the values level; separating the minimal from the substantial; going process by process; thinking creatively about legitimacy beyond formal votes; constructing shared purpose or shared identity; building coalitions of the willing; repairing the relational; spotting when a fight is a proxy for something else; using stories; and, occasionally, harnessing constructive ambiguity. Each has different moral implications and costs, and knowing which to reach for is most of the craft.

I learned much of this running Labour Together through Labour's most divided years. We found format shapes what's sayable: roundtables built around a shared meal let members from opposing factions have conversations a CLP meeting's for-or-against structure makes impossible — the format did the bridging. And shared analysis has to come before shared strategy: the 2019 election review worked because a cross-factional commission and a survey of 11,000+ members meant everyone had co-produced the analysis and no one could dismiss it as spin. Campaign Lab applies the same craft to a different boundary, creating environments where technologists and campaigners can experiment together.

I can help fellows think through questions like: When is disagreement useful? How do you stop groups fragmenting? How do you build consensus without flattening differences? When do you compromise versus hold the line? That includes practical approaches to facilitation, coalition governance, designing decision-making processes, and creating enough trust for experimentation. I've spent a lot of time in spaces where people care deeply, disagree strongly and still need to move together.

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?

I can help fellows think beyond "how do we use AI?" to "what changes because AI exists?" My work sits at the intersection of organising, campaigning and emerging technology: testing where AI actually improves political work and where it creates new risks, with a focus on keeping humans in the loop rather than replacing political judgement.

Through Campaign Lab I've supported a wide range of experiments: campaign training simulations, hyperlocal chat interfaces, social listening at scale, and agentic experiments. I also train campaigners in AI tools and help organisations write AI policies.

In July we ran the AI & Campaigning Conference, stress-testing persuasion bots, synthetic focus groups, agent swarms, content tools and canvass training in one room. The lessons form a good map of where political AI actually is:

• AI isn't replacing campaigners - it's changing what they spend their time doing. Almost nobody wanted AI to replace campaigning; the question was where AI makes humans better at it.
• Listening may be more valuable than persuading. If AI helps politicians hear more people rather than simply speak more efficiently, that's a very different vision of political technology.
• Agents still need humans and AI can only act on what's legible. Our agent-swarm demo only worked once a campaigner calibrated it, and at one point became comically obsessed with verifying whether an Oxfordshire stream actually existed. If something isn't clearly documented online, AI will struggle with it which matters enormously for hyperlocal politics, where much of what's important lives in people's heads rather than on the internet. Domain expertise and collaboration between campaigners and technologists still matter.
• Synthetic voters are useful, but they're not voters. Incredibly useful for exploration; dangerous if treated as evidence.
• More content isn't better communication. When everyone can publish ten times as much, quality becomes even more important.
• Training people may be one of AI's biggest opportunities simulated voters building volunteer confidence before real doors, not replacing organisers.
• When everyone can build, value shifts from writing software to orchestrating workflows, designing systems, and knowing when to move fast versus when infrastructure demands care.

I'm particularly useful if you're trying to answer questions like: What campaign functions should be automated, and which never should be? How do you run ethical political experiments and test tools safely in real environments? I'm interested in political products that increase participation, responsiveness and capacity rather than simply optimising persuasion and I keep a watching brief on how these capabilities are used for more problematic ends.