North Yorkshire Mayoral Candidate 2024 - Paul Haslam
A low-carbon campaign website for independent York & North Yorkshire mayoral candidate Paul Haslam, designed to reflect his commitment to sustainability in both message and execution. Although Paul was not elected, the project successfully demonstrated how political campaigning can align digital performance with environmental values.
Brief
Paul Haslam - independent candidate for Mayor of York & North Yorkshire, the region's first-ever Climate Change Champion, an ESG consultant, GreenTech Gathering follower, and Chair of the Transport for the North Scrutiny Committee - needed a campaign website that genuinely reflected his environmental principles.
Standing free from party politics, his digital presence had to reflect his independent values: authentic, purposeful and sustainable. Paul also needed a coherent ecosystem of sites spanning his campaign, personal brand, consulting and executive coaching practice - all built with the same emphasis on performance and low environmental impact.
Approach
Built a lean, performant campaign site using WordPress and BricksBuilder, hosted on green infrastructure powered by renewable energy and efficient servers. Aggressive optimisation of scripts, images and assets cut file sizes significantly - a triple win for carbon footprint, page loading speed and SEO.
Paul's personal environmental commitments - including his home beekeeping - were woven throughout the site, supported by a Website Carbon badge confirming a Grade A rating. While some mainstream party sites were initially scoring D‑F, the contrast highlighted the disconnect between climate rhetoric and digital practice, prompting larger parties to raise their game.
An interactive Google Maps feature tracked Paul's marathon-style hustings tour across the region, combining campaign stops with his London Marathon training in a lower-carbon way - quite literally running for Mayor! With scheduled routes and live tracking, it gave voters a distinctive way to follow the journey, promoted his charity fundraising, and helped supporters see when he would be in their area to meetup.
The site also served as an active campaign tool, hosting a detailed regional manifesto, a crowdfunding donation page, media biography and a grassroots volunteer recruitment section. Rather than acting as a static brochure, it supported engagement, mobilisation and supporter growth throughout the campaign.
Paul's personal presence was extended without the cost and overhead of traditional video production through an AI-generated video avatar, paired with a realistic voice clone trained on his own voice and speaking style. This created a scalable, personable communication tool for both the campaign and his later coaching content, allowing scripts written by Paul to be deployed rapidly.
As a political figure, Paul's websites were naturally exposed to elevated levels of bot traffic and malicious requests. Throughout the project, the National Cyber Security Centre's Defending Democracy guidance was referenced. Issued by the NCSC as part of GCHQ, this guidance informed not only the website build itself but also the security of Paul's wider digital estate, helping protect political candidates and campaigns against cyber threats.
Cloudflare DNS forms part of our standard security stack across all of our websites, helping to mitigate denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other unwanted traffic. For this project, Cloudflare Turnstile was also implemented to protect submissions from spam - selected over reCAPTCHA for its lower overheads and reduced carbon footprint.
In parallel, a full LMS (Learning Management System) platform was integrated into Paul's coaching website to support his executive coaching and leadership development programmes. This broader impact-led approach also carried through into the commercial model via B1G1 (Buy1Give1), with each coaching or ESG consulting sale contributing to social or environmental initiatives including beekeeping support in Kenya, education in India, and livestock support in Vietnam.
My Role
Website Developer- Creative Collaboration: Partnered with DW Multimedia for creative design and build.
- Interactive Maps: Built a Google Maps integration tracking hustings stages and Paul's marathon tour route across York and North Yorkshire.
- AI Avatar: Created an AI-generated video avatar paired with an authentic voice-clone for scalable, personable campaign and coaching content.
- Online Booking: Online consultation booking with NeetoCal integration.
- Secure O365 Setup: Configured Office 365 with mandatory 2FA, full SPF, TLS, DKIM & DMARC email authentication, and aligned setup with NCSC Defending Democracy guidance.
- Hosting & Optimisation: Managed green website hosting with SEO optimisation and carbon footprint reduction.
- LMS Integration: Learning Management System integration supporting executive coaching and leadership development courses.
- Payments & Crowdfunding: Built a crowdfunding donation page and online payment platform for courses via Stripe and PayPal.
- Events Calendar: Online events listings for workshops, webinars and coaching sessions.
Technology Stack
Gallery
🌱 Environmental Impact
Paul's Grade A carbon-rated site reinforced his climate credentials and demonstrated that political campaigns can practise what they preach. It also raised awareness of digital sustainability, prompting mainstream parties to up their game and bring their websites more in line with their climate rhetoric, lifting their scores from the D–F range - a step closer to net zero.
Notable Highlights
- Green hosting powered by renewable energy and efficient servers
- Website Carbon badge - verified Grade A score, outperforming rival party F-graded sites
- AI avatar with HeyGen & ElevenLabs authentic video and voice clone
- Image and asset optimisation: lower carbon footprint, faster page loads, better SEO
- Interactive Google Maps hustings marathon route to engage voters across the region
- LMS coaching platform for executive coaching programmes
Outcomes & Metrics
- Website Carbon Badge: Grade A
