Democratic Lottery workflow

Organising a democratic lottery naturally breaks down into several stages, as follows:

1. Invitations, recipients and registration page

Your first job is to set up the system which will allow people to register their interest in participating. This stage typically takes three weeks.

1a. Designing invitations

We must design an “invitation to register interest”. In the case of a postal recruitment this typically involves a letter, invite card and bespoke envelope, examples of which can be seen here. The invitation material will rely on the basic data that you have established in advance.

Accessibility is crucial – the average reading age of adults in the UK is estimated to be between 9 and 11 years old, so invitation material should be pitched at this level. It should also take into account the possibility that the recipient may not have English as a first language.

1b. Selecting recipients

While invites are being designed, we also need to select, by lottery, the people who will receive the invitations. For a postal recruitment we typically select recipients from a national database, restricting the selection to the population of interest (e.g. if the assembly is for the people of the “Region of Sortonia”, then we only select addresses from that region.

1c. Registration page

You will need to set up a method for people who recieve an invite to say “Yes”! Most people will do this via an online form, but it is also good to give the option of telephone regisration.

To set up your page you will need to know which features and feature values you will be using for your [targets]((democratic-lottery/selection/targets2/). For instance, if you are going to have a “gender” target, then your page will need a question “What is your gender?” together with the answers: female / “male* / non-binary or other.

2. Printing and posting

For postal invitations, however, you will need materials to be printed and then posted: we typically allow two weeks for printing, and another week for posted invitations to land on doorsteps. Consequently, this stage typically takes three weeks.

If your invitation to register interest is by email or social media, then, once invitations are ready, they can be posted immediately and no extra time is needed.

On the other hand, note that post may take longer at certain times of the year and in certain places.

3. Registering and setting targets

Once invitations have arrived on people’s doorsteps, we must allow some time for people to read and decide if they want to register interest. This stage typically takes two weeks

While this is happening, there are two key jobs to do:

3a. Monitor registrations

You need to keep an eye on who is registering to make sure everything is running smoothly. If you identify that a certain key group of people are not responding to your invitation (e.g. young people), then you may decide to take swift action to try and attract more responses from that group.

3b. Finalise targets

You’ve already decided which features you’ll be using for your targets, now you need to put numbers to them. E.g. How many female participants do you want, and how many male?

4. Selection and confirmation

The day after your registration period closes, it is time to run the selection. This typically takes a matter of minutes. We then spend the rest of the week ringing all of the selected participants and confirming that they are still available for participation. This stage typically takes one week.

We usually have to replace about 10% of the selected participants during this time because their circumstances have changed and they are no longer able to take part.

5. Onboarding and preparing for the first meeting.

Once all participants have confirmed their willingness to participate, organisers will need to share practical information about participating. This is the onboarding stage and typically takes three weeks.

Mundane details are very important: where to park, how to attend online meetings, how to book travel or accommodation etc. In addition it will be important to make sure individual support needs are catered for: particular dietary requirements, accessibility needs and so on.

In total

The workflow above adds up to 11 weeks. We usually try to allow 12 weeks from the start of recruitment to the first meeting - the buffer time helps to relieve some pressure!