Andrew Cave, the Head of Policy, opened the workshop by saying the General Election offered the opportunity for a "quantum leap in profile development for the FSB" and highlighted the fact that, with an election which was expected to be too close to call, the FSB had the chance to significantly affect the result.

He suggested that Regions and Branches concentrated their efforts on three key groups:

• New candidates for the major parties in marginal or safe seats

• Sitting MPs in safe seats

• Sitting MPs in marginal seats

He said that the terms of engagement should be either to try to identify what the candidates could do for local small businesses, but that preferable was to adopt an approach of seeking to find ways that the FSB could do to help the candidates.

Candidates, he said, wanted to meet members, to build a relationship and that the FSB could offer dialogue and 'friendship'.

He suggested that possible campaigning events could include:

• Writing to PPCs sending copies of the manifesto

• Arranging meetings with candidates

• Themed meetings for candidates - for example over the issue of pub ties, held in a pub and designed to get media coverage.

He cautioned against arranging hustings meetings and said that, whatever activity was done, the objective was both to build relationships with potential MPs and to get media coverage.

Stephen Alambritis, Head of Press and Public Affairs, gave advice on dealing with the press. He said that prior to sending an emailed press release, it was desirable to ring the journalist to say that it was coming. The text for the press release should be in the body of the email and not sent as an attachment.

It was sometimes a good idea to offer a story to a journalist on an exclusive basis, but perfectly acceptable to offer it to every one if the first person chose not to run it. He said that each release should try to illustrate the general issue with a case study or real-life example.

Local papers had cut back on the number of photographers so it was important to make sure that you had your own photographer at events. Photographs could be sent as an attachment to the emailed press release.

In discussion after the presentations, it was stated that the policy team suggested that BNP candidates were not invited to events. Andrew had commented that there was no point in engaging with fringe candidates and Stephen said that, so long as the names of all candidates were read out or published at the meeting, there was no need to invite all the candidates in a particular seat to an FSB event.