In 2020, constituents are interacting with their elected representatives more than ever. That’s great for continuing democracy between elections, however it provides a technical challenge for our MPs and their offices. But this volume of interaction gives an opportunity for greater understanding of their residents too.

A healthy number of constituents still send letters though a majority of the correspondence is now made up of emails, while other bits come in via social media, like Twitter and Facebook. The prevalence of digital tools amongst modern populations makes this interaction easier, and cheaper, for constituents - so engagement numbers for elected representatives have gone through the roof in recent years.

More and more elected representatives are also taking advantage of these changes themselves, and taking steps to encourage as much contact as possible. This is because while the process is good for constituents, it’s also great for the politicians themselves. Most politicians know the constituency or region they represent really well, and they have a good handle on what’s going on. But they can always gain greater insight to inform their work, and high levels of engagement is a vital step in gathering the data required to acquire that enhanced view.

Thanks to these modern technologies, MPs are now being directly contacted over 500 times a week. When you reach that volume it's impossible for one person to immediately know everything that’s going on in detail. You just can't gain a full understanding of the constituents without some kind of assistance, politicians and their staff require digital solutions to really understand the data.

Caseworker does just this, to help elected representatives who want to maximise what they get from the interactions they have with the public.

So how does Caseworker help?

With Caseworker you are able to ensure that every interaction is properly categorised in a similar way. As the system helps you ensure that everything is logged under a broad based policy area, a category, a contact type and tags, you know your data is structured properly, every time.

It's key that the data is logged for every case in a consistent way. That's because firstly you need the data to exist in a visible and accessible way in the first place, and secondly you need that data to be comparable over time in order to notice and track trends.

The other advantage of Caseworker is that, because the system is easy to use, your office is able to log all of this information quickly and with little friction. That means it doesn't feel like data entry, it's just a by product of doing the job.

Now you're gathering this information while you're doing your jobs, what can be done with it? The advantage of Caseworker is that it provides the information to you clearly. You'll be able to see which tags you use most often in any time period you want, making it clear at a glance what's happening at that time.

This information is then displayed to you throughout the system, giving you a regular view about what's happening in your area

One of the problems of large amounts of data is the risk of being blinded to some of the seemingly smaller things that are going on. Even though they might see lower volumes of correspondence, in reality they might actually be more important.

For example you may have received 200 emails from individuals about a particular national policy issue, and that should be noted. However you have to avoid missing 10 people contacting about a specific problem that is causing real issues in their lives.

That's why we allow everything in Caseworker to be filtered, to find that detail in what's going on.

On the statistics page you can can decide to look at only stats on Casework issues, or just policy issues. While on the Cases tab you have full flexibility to find the granular detail you're looking for

Another key part of our philosophy, is that everything you add to Caseworker, and all the information you log in the system is yours, and will always be yours.

That means that you can do whatever you wish to with that data. If you want to export email mailing lists of people who've signed up to a newsletter, you can do. If you want to export out case information as a .csv file to analyse externally you can do that too. We want to provide you with the flexibility to achieve your goals with Caseworker.

All of this means that, while Caseworker helps you and your office work at scale, it also ensures you're able to gain real insight into what's happening, and cut through to the detail you need.