The MCC Elections team recruits and trains hundreds of Council staff each year to work polling stations and counting positions. Until 2019, this training was delivered mainly through face-to-face sessions. The 2021 Greater Manchester Mayoral election, running as it did under social distancing restrictions, required a different approach.
Serving as project manager, I led an initiative to transform the training programme into a course of 12 animated videos. I wrote the scripts, adapting the existing material into simpler English and planning the visuals for our in-house design studio to animate. The course was well received and is still in use every year, not just at MCC but across all Greater Manchester boroughs for GM Mayoral and Parliamentary elections.
Election legislation changes regularly, and the videos have needed many updates over the years. In 2024 they needed a major overhaul; my colleague Laura Pearson had previously voiced the narration, but there was too much rerecording for her schedule to accommodate. I saw an opportunity to streamline the update process for future years and spearheaded our Communications team’s first major AI-enabled project.
Using ElevenLabs and Laura’s hours of previous recordings, I created a voice clone that allowed us to generate new narration in minutes rather than scheduling recording sessions. I was even able to preserve her Rotherham accent in the settings. This innovation has saved our team dozens of work hours to date and built a workflow that makes legislative updates much faster to implement going forward.
It takes a lot of planning and work, but it’s worth it: these training videos are some of the most-watched content produced across our entire team, so they need to be right!