Branch Committee - Annual Report

Edinburgh Branch committee report

Annual Report 2021 (September 2020 to June 2021)

It’s been a busy 10 months for the Branch Committee. We’ve focused our efforts
on the Holyrood 2021 campaign and keeping the branch activities going despite
ongoing covid-19 restrictions. We would like to extend our massive thanks to
everyone who has been involved with the branch over the past year, particularly
during such difficult times.

We have changed the time of our AGMs to fall in line with when other branches
across the country have their AGMs, this report covers 10 months from September
2020 - June 2021.

Holyrood Election 2021

The biggest area of work for the Edinburgh Branch Committee over the past 9
months has been our Holyrood 2021 election campaign!

Despite uncertainty and restricted campaigning because of Covid-19 lockdown and
social distancing measures we had a record campaign in Lothian with returning
MSP Alison Johnstone andparty co-leader Lorna Slater, both elected as regional
MSPs. The 50,000 regional votes cast for the Greens is by far the highest-ever
and the 12.7% vote share surpasses the 12.0% secured in 2003 to make it the
biggest Green vote ever in Scotland. Alison Johnstone has since gone on to be
elected as the first ever Green Presiding Officer at the Scottish Parliament.

As part of our campaign, volunteers across Edinburgh and West Lothian made more
than 200,000 deliveries of Holyrood election materials, and fundraised tens of
thousands of pounds. We saw the number of impressions of the branch Twitter
account rise by an average of 500% in the final 3 months of the campaign, and
hit a 4 year high for membership figures across Edinburgh and West Lothian.

We have also put in a large amount of effort to complete a thorough debrief and
review process, including writing handover and “lessons learned” document for
future elections, based on feedback from members, local teams, staff members,
candidates and the campaign board team.

We’d like to thank all of our volunteers for the amazing work that they did
during this Holyrood election campaign. It was a phenomenal effort with an
amazing result.

By-elections and preparations for 2022 local elections

In the past nine months we also contested two local authority by-elections. Our
first election was the Craigentinny & Duddingston by-election in Nov 2020- the
local team worked incredibly hard and secured a great result for Scottish
Greens, increasing our vote share by 4.1% and only 20 votes off Scottish
Labour’s result. Our second by-election was in West Lothian in Livingston South
constituency, our candidate here was Cameron Glasgow and we won 2.4% of the
total vote.

At our 2020 AGM we selected 16 candidates for Edinburgh Council elections in
2022. Over the past year, the 12 target candidates have been supported with a
Target Candidate Development Programme, which is designed to give target
candidates the knowledge, skills and tools to run local campaigns and be a good
councillor once elected.

Branch events, meetings and trainings

All of our events continue to be online due to covid restrictions this year. Our
events included:

Membership and local teams

As of June 2021 the number of SGP members in Edinburgh was 1,678 and 126 in West
Lothian. At the beginning of last year we saw a small drop off in numbers, this
has largely been attributed to people moving out of Edinburgh and some glitches
with the central system, something many local team members discovered when
contacting volunteers for the Holyrood election campaign. During our active
Holyrood campaign months our membership steadily grew month on month, taking it
to the record four year high reported above.

The membership and local teams working group led the In-Real-Life (IRL) part of
the Holyrood campaign. A key part of this was producing a number of briefings
ranging from our target to win election strategy to how to use Bulk SMS to send
text to members of local teams. A number of phone banking sessions were also
arranged to help find and match volunteers to local teams.

In addition to the Holyrood campaign, the local team officer helped support the
creation of West Edinburgh Greens - a new local team, and began working with
them on how they can be better plugged into Edinburgh Branch’s work.

Communications

In Autumn 2020, we launched a brand new and beautiful Edinburgh branch website.
One Hundred thanks to Alison Neathey, for its creation and keeping it up to
date. Alison also led the coordination for the content for our two Green News
editions in winter and spring 2021.

Our policy officers Yasmin and Tristan have worked with our elected councillors
and MSPs to submit and share monthly reports on their work with Edinburgh Branch
members. Thank you Yasmin and Tristan.

Our communication co-convenor, Harriet Hall, has worked tirelessly to produce
regular, monthly Edinburgh Branch email updates to members. Harriet has also
helped to increase our social media use across all of our platforms (Twitter,
Facebook and Instagram) to communicate events, opportunities, and election
messages to members, voters and the local community - including coordinating our
multilingual get out the vote videos, see here. Big thank you to Harriet.

Gavin Corbett has continued to support elected members and the Branch to
generate local media coverage of Green Party impact and policy, including
regular Councillor columns in the Edinburgh Evening News.

The talents of photographers, website designers, editors, graphic and video
makers in supporting the development of our communications content have been
much appreciated throughout the year. Special thanks to Gordon Craig for his
rapid editing of videos, particularly through the Holyrood campaign and to Jenny
Smith for all her support with Branch social media content.

Other committee business

Other areas of committee business in the past ten months have included: