2015-10-27
The past year in the national office was focused on consolidation of existing activities, and planning and preparing for the next election — and with hints of early elections along the way.
By Brett Constable
This last year in the national office was focused on consolidation of existing activities, and planning and preparing for the next election — and with hints of early elections along the way.
We have made some good solid progress on a range of key projects, including:
- Introduction of monthly 'engagement' reports to track the reach and effectiveness of our communications across all channels — noting that we have just recently topped 200,000 likes on Facebook;
- Trialling the operation of a National Call Centre, hosted by the Victorian Greens, to support fundraising activities for all States;
- Running a 'geeks and campaigners' weekend to make sure our IT systems development is focused on meeting the priority needs of our campaigners across the country;
- Establishing a new position of “Systems Liaison Coordinator” to ensure the momentum and focus commenced at the 'geeks and campaigners' weekend is maintained with the aim of all users being properly informed of the capacity of existing systems and the direction they are heading in, with easy access to training and up to date resources for ongoing support.
The transition to the new National Council structure has certainly transformed the extent of engagement in national office activities, and the pace of decision making has picked up — and thus the pace and need to feed information through to support that decision-making.
National Council has also created the Campaign Management Team which meets weekly towards progressing our preparations for the coming federal election.
The leadership transition from Christine Milne to Richard Di Natale has resulted in a change to most of the faces behind the roles in the Leader's Office. This change in staffing has taken time to complete but the change in faces has been accompanied by a renewal of energy and new opportunities to increase further the collaboration across our offices.
Apart from myself, our national office currently comprises:
- Mark Quinn holds the fort in our Canberra office dealing with public contact and providing support to other staff and State offices with system support queries.
- Helen Thompson, our part-time finance officer in Sydney, who also undertakes accounting functions for the NT Greens, Green Institute and the Asia Pacific Greens Federation.
- Susan Griffiths-Sussems, our fundraising coordinator in Hobart, coordinates our national fundraising activities and supports States with their own fundraising initiatives.
- Rosanne Bersten, our communications coordinator in Melbourne, manages ongoing communications activities and is also integral to the design work critical to our election preparations.
- Andrew Cormick-Dockery, our online systems coordinator in Melbourne, who has been backed up this year while on parental leave by Seamus Lee and Michael Welford assisting to keep national IT infrastructure online. Andrew is very ably supported by some outstanding volunteers, particularly Erich Schultz, Seamus Lee, and Chris Maltby along with our contractors, Andrew McNaughton and Fuzion in New Zealand.
- Ben Cronly is our Call Centre Team Leader in Melbourne. From the initial trial project, which commenced in February, we have now managed to secure core funding from States to continue the work at least until the end of June next year.
- Evan Davies has recently replaced Lucy Quarterman as our International Development Officer. Evan works from Melbourne on the projects we fund with the government grant we receive as part of the Australian Political Parties for Democracy Program.
- Ogy Simic is our new Campaign Coordinator and is also based in Melbourne.
- John Twyman is our most recent addition as the Systems Liaison Coordinator, as described above, and working out of Sydney.
Thanks to all our staff across all offices and the many volunteers who help the Party continue to grow and develop the means to run each campaign stronger than the last.