Election candidate target databases

As part of your subscription to our Advocacy tools, we also provide candidate databases for selected data sets which you can use with Email-to-Target pages.

Before using a candidate database…

We strongly recommend that you use a custom envelope for sending to candidate targets, otherwise delivery is likely to be affected. Please check this article on how to do this, or talk to support.

Which candidate databases are provided?

We provide:

• Westminster MP candidates

• Devolved nations candidates (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland)

• Police Commissioner candidates

• London Assembly candidates 

• Canadian Federal Election candidates

Please note:

• Mayoral candidates – these should be used as custom contacts rather than a postcode-matched database. Since these are small databases, we would recommend that you collect the information from online sources. Please contact support if you need help setting the database up

When are these released?

We would expect to provide a working database roughly 3 months before an election, with coverage increasing every week after making it available. If an election is called sooner (for example, a snap election) than the scheduled date, we will immediately begin building the database. We will provide an ongoing report to show you how many candidates are currently on the list and then you can decide when to launch your campaign.

While this takes place, we will clear the actual target databases (we will mark this as DO NOT USE) since it would otherwise contain out of date data.

Once the election is over and candidates elected, we update the actual databases for you to use with the new targets and close the candidate database. We would have the new database ready for you a couple of days after the results are published on official websites. For a rough guide after the election ends you should expect the database to be ready:

• UK – within a week for national elections, or over a month after councillor elections. 

• USA – within two weeks of candidates being sworn in

• Canada – a number of weeks, usually over a month.

• Australia – a number of weeks, usually over a month. We will let you know once the databases have been updated after the recent Australian elections.