Douglas Carswell

Conservative party membership should be growing. Here's how

It has never been easier to build a mass membership movement. Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, it has never been simpler to bring like-minded folk together. In the age of email, it has never been more straight forward to communicate with them and to mobilise them.

Yet party membership is dying. Why?

Political parties have simply not learnt how to use the digital tools at their disposal.

An averagely competent MP should not only be on Twitter. They could quite easily have a couple of thousand local followers. They ought to have a similar size number of constituency friends on Facebook, and say four to five thousand political email contacts. Allowing for duplicates, that means each individual MP should have say 6,000 digital contacts in their constituency.

Imagine if each MP was able to convert one in twenty of their digital followers into a local party member? That would increase the average local association membership by 300 people. Impossible? We are well on our way to achieving this in my Clacton constituency.

Better still, what if the party created a new category of membership – iMembership – specifically designed to ease the conversion of Twitter and Facebook followers into party members?

If you could join online for £1 a year at the click of a mouse, instead of signing up one in twenty digital followers, what if you managed to sign up one in ten instead? That would mean 600 new members. Given that the average association membership today is 200 members, this could transform the party.

Today Grant Shapps has taken the bold decision to publish Conservative membership data. Inevitably this will lead to lots of stories about how party membership has halved in five years.

But the real significance of today's announcement is that he is going to break the figures down by association. This is going to create what management consultants call "systems competition" between different associations. Best practice won't need to be spread – it will spread itself. Which might just start to reverse years of decline.

There is nothing inevitable about falling party membership. We just need to change the party.

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