As part of your subscription to our Advocacy tools, we also provide candidate databases for selected data sets which you can use with Email-to-Target pages.
Before using a candidate database…
We strongly recommend that you use a custom envelope for sending to candidate targets, otherwise delivery is likely to be affected. Please check this article on how to do this, or talk to support.
Which candidate databases are provided?
We provide:
- Westminster MP candidates
- Devolved nations candidates (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland)
- Police Commissioner candidates
- London Assembly candidates
- Mayoral candidates – note that these should be used as custom contacts rather than a postcode-matched database. Please contact support who can provide you with a candidate list nearer these elections
When are these released?
We would expect to provide a working database roughly 3 months before an election, with coverage increasing every week after making it available. We will provide an ongoing report to show you how many candidates are currently on the list and then you can decide when to launch your campaign.
While this takes place, we will clear the actual target databases (we will mark this as DO NOT USE) since it would otherwise contain out of date data.
Once the election is over and candidates elected, we update the actual databases for you to use with the new targets and close the candidate database. We would have the new database ready for you a couple of days after the results are published on official websites. For a rough guide after the election ends you should expect the database to be ready:
- UK – within a week for national elections, or over a month after councillor elections.
- USA – 2-3 months
- Canada – a number of weeks, usually over a month.
- Australia – a number of weeks, usually over a month. We will let you know once the databases have been updated after the recent Australian elections.
What databases will you provide for elections in 2024?
UK General Election in 2024
Timings
- We will start building a candidate database as soon as an election is announced and candidate information becomes available and is validated by our Political Data team. We will then make a candidate database live as soon as there is at least one candidate name (and their email address) available for each constituency.
- We hope to have a candidate database within two weeks of the election announcement.
- Once the election is over and candidates elected, we will update the standard databases with the new targets and close the candidate database. These databases are usually ready a couple of days after the results are published on official websites.
What about boundary changes?
We will be updating the new parliamentary constituency boundaries once the general election is held, so that supporter postcodes select the correct candidates in the candidate database.
The candidate and post-election database will use the new boundaries but not the current database.
Can you provide a candidate database before the announcement?
Our main sources do not have any contacts published as of February 2024, and the parties have not published official lists. We therefore would wait until the announcement before creating the new database. This is based on experience in past elections – publishing anything before is likely to be inaccurate and subject to major changes before the official announcement.
How do I keep up to date with this?
We will be emailing updates regarding this once an election is announced so be sure to sign up for email updates if you haven’t already, or feel free to contact your account manager.
What about candidate databases for councillor elections?
We do not provide a candidate database for councillor elections. There is a lot of work required to maintain candidate databases. Data changes frequently, and often use personal email addresses. This data is hard to collect, and hard to verify.
The councillor databases contain many thousands of contacts, and with candidates as well this would multiply the list by many times. It would be a massive undertaking to provide this accurately.
In addition, ward boundaries change during an election and Ordnance Survey do not release these new boundaries until after the election. It is therefore not possible for us to properly match a postcode to a ward and to select the correct candidates.