Creating a Brighter Future With the Gloucestershire Conservatives

In the wake of the European Union’s disruptive General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), campaigns and causes across Europe are continuing to work towards modernizing their data collection, storage, and retention processes. For many organizations, like the Gloucestershire Conservatives, that means a move to NationBuilder.

From the very beginning, NationBuilder took GDPR compliance very, very seriously — doubling down on its “you own your data” philosophy and developing ever-more-useful tools to help organizations and individuals manage their data in a compliant way. Now, campaigns and causes across Europe are seeing the benefits of investing in the platform to kill two proverbial birds with one stone: working towards GDPR compliance while also modernizing their digital and field organizing toolkit.

As the Gloucestershire Conservatives set out to make a move to NationBuilder earlier this year, they partnered with us to build out their website with usability and GDPR compliance in mind. That website launched this week (gloucestershireconservatives.com), and now we’re excited to share it with the world.

“Hines Digital made the complex process of building a site from scratch really easy and straightforward.”

—Gloucestershire Conservatives

Using Consent Forms to Empower Supporters & Comply With GDPR

Across the web design industry, GDPR brought fears that asking for more explicit consent from supporters would hurt “conversion rates” and ruin engagement. At Hines Digital, we’ve seen the opposite — and we’re honestly very excited about it.

By empowering supporters to manage their opt-in preferences and then honoring those requests, our clients have found their email engagement rates increase, the fundraising results improve, and their effective costs per email acquisition fall. Consent-based marketing works.

That’s why, rather than design around GDPR compliance, we designed the Gloucestershire Conservatives’ website with consent forms as a prominent user experience. Throughout the site, every signup form includes explicit consent requests so that supporters are always in control of their data.

Making Everything Editable; No Coding Required

For the Gloucestershire Conservatives, their internal team needed to be empowered to update and maintain their website without the day-to-day assistance of a “coder.”

To meet those needs, we approached the project with a “theme-first” strategy: prioritizing the wholistic development of a NationBuilder theme and then using that theme — via the NationBuilder control panel — to build the website itself without additional coding.

“The process of fine-tuning the features we wanted once the foundations were in place was really smooth and Hines Digital created a site that we are delighted with.”

—Gloucestershire Conservatives

Across the site, the Gloucestershire Conservatives can edit all of their content without ever needing to lean on the assistance of a “coder,” including adding background photos & videos, editing page headlines, updating forms, adding & removing links, and reorganizing the content of their homepage.

This foundational design decision means that the party, and its staffers, are in direct control of their website — allowing them to update it to keep up with ever-increasing the speed of British politics.

Conclusion

Going forward, Gloucestershire Conservatives’ supporters will be in total control over their data preferences — a requirement for any modern British campaign — and their staff and volunteers will be in total control of their website’s content. 

By embracing NationBuilder’s platform, and by investing in a powerfully functional NationBuilder website theme, they have taken a significant step towards building a brighter future for themselves and their supporters.

“We would have no hesitation in recommending Hines Digital to other NationBuilder customers.”

—Gloucestershire Conservatives