Hattie Schofield + Simple Politics
We spoke to Hattie who took on Simple Politics in 2016 as a side project. Together with Tatton Spiller she turned it into a community of +350,000 people, with an Instagram, Twitter and newsletter that has become an essential resource for understanding the political situation in the UK.
How it started
Simple Politics was set up to simplify politics. It is now the go-to resource for reliable, unbiased and frequent updates on UK politics, with their posts reaching more than two million people during the election. It was created by Tatton Spiller, with Hattie joining initially as a side project. The aim was to explain legislation only, but as he and Hattie saw an increasing need for more broad political updates, the goal became something much bigger. Simple Politics now exists to explain processes, break down arguments and go through some of the more complicated terms used in politics to help make politics accessible to all.
Hattie had never studied Politics but she had always had a curiosity in it and was keen to learn more. “I knew this was something I wanted to learn” she says “I’d thought about doing a similar project myself but because of my other job I didn’t have the mental space to make a business plan, especially not knowing that much about politics.”
Building the reach
Hattie is modest when I ask her how they managed to build an organic reach of such scale. “I don’t know how that happened! It’s the political climate at the moment. People looking for other accounts, other news sources, places to go to make sense or the mess. There are lots of constitutional problems that people have encountered and gone ‘hold on this isn’t the way that politics is usually run…’ I think that was the driver of its success - everyone’s eyes are on politics. There is an element of the way we do things and the tone and the humour too that makes it a fun project to follow, rather than just BBC news.”
The beginning
Now, looking at Simple Politics it seems so clear what they stand for. But when they started, it was a lot less defined. Like many early projects, the future was always unpredictable. “You have a limited amount of time, energy and resources” Hattie says; “At some point you just have to go with the flow, instead of going with a plan. You read these things online about a 15 point plans, but that just doesn’t work for everyone. I don’t think we would have been successful if we hadn’t been flexible.”
Like all early stage side projects - self doubt was rife. “Initially we were battling with ‘who are we? What’s our function? What do people come to us for? Are we explaining just legislation or everything?’ You have a lot of existential crises in the first period. You’re like ‘does anyone care if we don’t exist? Everyone will be fine anyway.”
“There are days when you want to give up, but the main thing is to remember is that it is a valuable project. No one else is doing it. For me, even if I’m helping one person understand politics, then I’m doing a good job. We don’t have to help every single person. Some people will come to the page and know a lot about politics, but a lot of people don’t and that’s OK”
Funding the project
In August 2016, Simple Politics tried to launch a Crowdfunder. Both Tatton and Hattie were totally new to it. “We’d never done it before, we didn’t know how to do it and we didn’t know how to engage with an audience. Now, we are very connected to our audience: people call us ‘SP’, they know who we are and they know what they come to us for, but at the beginning we didn’t know who we were, they didn’t know who we were and it was just a massive fail.”
“It was terrible. And I think Tatton ended up pulling it and giving everyone their money back. We hadn’t done any preparation, and those kinds of things happen at the beginning that you have to pull yourself up from them, and that’s tough.”
Tatton has always been open that he had some money behind the project to launch it, but this can’t last forever, and they have both since depended on Simple Politics to survive. “People should pay for your service. But even though people are invested in us, they don’t have anything to buy into. If you have products then that’s great, but it’s more difficult if you're just a service.”
“We’ve been very careful not to lose sight of who we are to monetise it - but we both depend on it to survive. It’s taking so much time but you’re not getting paid for it, it’s stressful. Monetizing it at an early stage is really hard. And it hurts when you believe in a project, and when no-one gives you money - it can feel like no-one believes in that project. Money is a hard thing to talk about to your followers.”
Taking time to recharge from a side project
It’s clear that Hattie and Tatton are incredibly passionate about the work they do. So much so, that often they will go full steam ahead until they’re close to burning out. In the summer of 2019, they both took a month off: “We had one really honest conversation saying we can’t do this - we can’t do this for another parliamentary calendar without having a break. We realised how much time and energy we had put into it. So we both put out posts saying we’ll be back in September. It’s so important to have space and time away to avoid burning out.”
“I really had to turn my laptop off go and take a break and step away from everything. I’m managing three accounts, I’m covering everything that’s happening in the day. Politics is a very overwhelming topic anyway and it’s very emotive, especially when you’re thinking about the consequences of this for your local area, your population, the economy.”
Side projects for self improvement
To stay focused, Hattie tries to set her own learning goals. “I set myself short, medium and long term goals. I try to go back to them and refresh my head a bit, I don’t stick to them necessarily, but if I have a vague idea of what I want to do, or where I want to be, and I get frustrated if I haven’t made that progress. But that’s not for everyone.”
Hattie has just taken a job with the foreign and commonwealth office, a move she credits entirely to her work with side project Simple Politics (SP): “The skills I’ve learnt here have 100% been the reason I got this job in the foreign and commonwealth office. They didn’t care about my masters, and they didn’t care about my jobs before then. Even if it isn’t successful, a side project can add to your CV and add to your general skillset.”
“There are so many other skills that you end up having to learn that you hadn’t even thought of before. Having your own side project forces you to learn skills that you’d not necessarily learn in a desk job, or when you’re employed by someone else and you don’t need to think about all those things. The skills this has given me have been amazing. It has given me a really deep understanding of politics, and friends and family will come to me as I know what’s going on. SP has forced me to stay up to date. We have 350,000 followers and they need it explaining it to them, so I need to get my head around it. I think if i was a different job I wouldn’t have made the time”
“At the very early stages [of a project], it’s hard, it’s hard, but I think it’s so important that people do it. That they do whatever their passion is. If you don’t do it, someone else will do it. Or no-one will do it.”
You can follow Simple Politics on Instagram here, or on Twitter here.