"We are proud of the good work we do to ensure that our students register to vote"

"We are proud of the good work we do to ensure that our students register to vote"

Dr Victoria Foster, Director of the Centre for Social Responsibility at Edge Hill University (EHU) shares their experiences of becoming a voter registration champion and the creative approaches they took to engage with their local community.

We are proud of the good work we do to ensure that our students register to vote when they enrol with us, and we wanted to be able to share this good practice as well as develop it. Developing our relationship with Lancashire Citizens seemed a good way to go about this.

The 2024 General Election was called rather sooner than expected, and we leapt into action. The process of becoming accredited with Citizens UK was streamlined to take into account this short notice and was very straightforward. They gave us access to a wealth of materials that we were able to draw on to publicise our mission of ensuring as many of our staff, students and local communities were registered to vote and understood the necessary ID requirements. We also wanted to publicise the importance of voting.

Some of the more innovative work that EHU carried out involved running a podcast series which garnered thousands of views. We also published a series of 'Elections Explained’ pieces on the website. The most popular Manifestos – And What They Mean For Young People had just under 5,000 hits, the best performing news piece on the Edge Hill University website in 2024. Meanwhile, our SU was doing some excellent work on social media including informative TikTok videos which reached over 21,000 students.

We also took our work out into the local community. An Edge Hill team of staff, students and community partners spent the day at the Concourse shopping centre in Skelmersdale to encourage passers-by to use their vote in the upcoming General Election. We engaged with a local theatre for social change organisation, Collective Encounters, to work with us to develop creative ways of engaging the general public in conversations about voting.

One method which worked surprisingly well on the day was co-created poetry. As we chatted with people about voting, and their opinions on politics and democracy, we asked them for words which summed up their feelings. We and our participants were impressed with the results which provided a clear distillation of their opinions.

It became clear that the public was neither apathetic nor apolitical as it is too readily assumed. However, although many people saw the importance of voting, there was a feeling of disillusionment in the system and concern that Skelmersdale had been neglected and would continue to be.

One member of our team did manage to change the mind of a disgruntled participant when it came to voting in the General Election. After his encounter with us he agreed to ‘give it a go, this time’.

We look forward to developing our work with Citizens UK and encouraging more staff and students to spend time listening to our local communities. There is much to be gained from this. We will also continue to encourage voting in future local and general elections and would urge anyone interested in this to become accredited Citizens UK Voter Registration Champions.