Candidates Start To Receive Our Q&A – We Launch Election Section!

With the local government elections just four weeks away, we have launched our election Q&A and information section as the final candidate lists have been released.

We have created a system, with some massive thanks to Adam Davies at MyDesign Wrexham for donating huge amounts of time to the project, that will enable the biggest range of questions to local candidates since we did a similar exercise back in 2012.

The homepage for the system can be found at the imaginatively titled Wrexham.com/election2017 where every ward has a page giving details on who is standing and where the actual ward itself is.

Each candidate has been posted a letter inviting them to take part, with a secure code set allowing them to login and create a profile.

This includes an overview section, plus various social media links, and meta details allowing us to do some ‘fun’ future pieces on age ranges of candidates for example.

Currently every candidate is an ‘egg’ – however there is an option for them to upload a profile picture, so hopefully over the coming days and weeks we will get a more personable set of pages!

The main area of the system is a question and answer section with a set of 25 questions with limited answer space (to make it more readable!) that we have distilled down from a shortlist of just under 50. Thanks to all who have helped us with that process!

We hope the questions give candidates the range to express their opinions and stance on several topics, ranging from their ward itself to technical points on how the council is run. We know we have had to leave a few questions out, but hope that the ones that made the final list prove interest to the people of Wrexham.

The development time of this system has spanned several months, and cumulated with some last minute testing last night, with a packed afternoon inputting the data from the Council’s PDF sheets manually.

From there the system allowed us to create 155 custom letters with unique login details, and of course the names and addresses for each candidate.

Several have asked why we did not just email candidates instead, however due to the way the data of candidates standing is produced it is not possible to do that in a fair and even manner. Hopefully future elections could see entirely digital communications taking place, which will save us a few quid on stamps, envelopes and pain of paper cuts…!

We managed to turn that around in a few hours (time lapse above) and less than 24 hours after the final candidate list was released the letters were starting to land on doorsteps across Wrexham.

For the record first access was from @Darren_Picken in Borras! https://t.co/LbcqctS2aw Post must be good around there… 👊

— Wrexham.com (@wrexham) April 6, 2017

We encourage all to take part, and that you check back on your wards or areas of interest as the answers and data gets filled in.

Visit it now… Wrexham.com/election2017