UCL Conservative Society

The next part of my Manifesto of Principles, which I am publishing on the UCL website for members to comment on.

Section 6: Conservative Future events & campaigning

Recognise the important part social events play in attracting new members
CF branches run varied events , week in, week out, all over the country. It goes without saying that these events play an important part in an association’s social calendar, and, as such, will remain, but we must realise the role they play: local recruitment. I believe the NME and CF Chairman should drive to make national events a higher standard, distinguishing them from local events and increasing out national appeal and profile.

Improve National Events
Currently the National events are very poor. The social events are few and far between and are usually held in one area of the country. The same is said for the National Campaign days; I don’t understand why the focus is on getting 50 people to one location in the whole country! There are target seats all over the country and we need to be using our resources effectively; we should focus on developing local ties and have simultaneous campaign days. I believe it will be far more impressive and effective to have 6 regional campaign days on one day and promoting them as a co-ordinated National Day.

The NME members will help branch and Area Chairmen to organise and run these. I also feel that campaigning alone is not the way ahead. On a National Day we could have 6 events comprising of, for example, 3 campaigning days, 2 social action projects and one full day social. We need to become much more attractive to a much wider audience.

Alter the format of national campaign days
The format of the individual campaigning days will be organised at local level, according to local support, taste and relevance. There are social action projects happening all over the country at the moment and they should be encouraged and supported. Remembering we are also a social organisation, it is important to offer social days as a way to reward and retain members, as well as being a proven method of attracting new members.

The Working Life Conference was cancelled earlier this year because so few people wanted to go: we should not be afraid to enrol other organisations to help support and organise such conferences, leveraging their expertise. Any group that wants to work with us can do so under my Chairmanship and that includes non-partisan organisations.

Prepend a CF day to Party Conference
The final National events will take place at the Party & Spring Conferences. At the spring conferences I will hold one main CF social plus an agenda for branches to hold their own events. The main plan will focus on the Party Conference, maximising the benefits of an existing national gathering.

I want to extend the Party Conference by attaching a CF day to the start of the week. It is hard for most CF members to give up weekends for separate conferences and so I feel it is better to extend the main Party conference and not steal another weekend! The Party will already have the facilities in place and so this will drastically cut down on the costs and improve attendance figures.

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