Does this bring in money or votes? Newsletter 19
Helloooooo and welcome to the next edition of DTBIMOV! (I tried, it doesn’t work, we’re moving on.)
I’m Meg DiMartino, the digital organizing director at the DNC, and I’m really excited to share an overview of what the GOTV (this one works great!) operation was at the DNC this cycle. Let’s GOTN (get out the newsletter) 👇
IWillVote.com
First, let’s start with some toplines of where we landed with IWillVote.com this cycle:
IWillVote.com had over 21 million unique visitors in the 2020 cycle. We expanded the functionality of the site to, for the first time, allow voters to request and track their vote-by-mail ballot all from IWillVote.com. Amidst the pandemic, this upgrade was key to making sure voters had the state-specific info and tools they needed to turnout.
And our bread and butter: polling place lookup support! On Election Day alone, we saw 1.2 million users on IWillVote.com and over 2 million pageviews, which is a 260% increase since Election Day 2018. On Election Day alone, over 400,000 voters found their polling place!
Over the course of GOTV (Oct 31 - Nov 3), we saw 2.17M polling place lookups across IWillVote partners, which is roughly the same amount we saw for the entire year of 2018.
A peek at polling place lookup stats in a few key states:
Pennsylvania - 180K
Michigan - 96K
Georgia - 74K
Arizona - 69K
GOTV Goals
As a complement to the Biden campaign, the DNC ran a hefty GOTV program broken up into two parts, voter contact & planned content. We had three main goals:
Reach voters in every ZIP code
Respond to people’s questions when we send them voting content and include an accessible way for people to reach us
Triple the impact of people who have already voted
REACH VOTERS IN EVERY ZIP CODE
A distributed texting program, affectionately known as Text out the Vote, is a tried & true tradition at the DNC, and 2020 was no different.
Across our 264-person DNC text team, composed of DNC staff & family, we sent over 1.1 million texts for mobilizing voters to take actions in some really critical states.
We sent these texts into 16 states, including ones like Alaska, Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Wyoming.
Facebook Organizing
We know that voters are on Facebook and joining online communities, and sharing voting content is one of the best ways to reach people everywhere. This cycle, we posted in 1,089 groups with a combined total reach of 13.4 million.
In addition to focusing on organizing in these groups regionally, we also were sure to use them as a coalition building tool. For example, in total, we reached out to 134 Latinx community groups on Facebook, reaching over 391,000 people.
We ended the cycle with 1,698 online community leaders that we leveraged during GOTV to help us spread our message and helpful voter education info across Facebook.
And if you’re interested in Facebook group organizing, #WatchThisSpace for a newsletter that goes deeper on that soon.
Planned SMS Content
One of our BIG goals we accomplished going into the 2020 cycle was to build a broadcast SMS list of at least 1% of eligible Democratic voters in a given battleground state -- both to do short term GOTV and build long-term assets for the future. Since 2020 began, we’ve had nearly 925% growth in battleground states to our SMS list.
Across broadcast SMS, we sent out over 100 state-specific text messages for early vote, voter registration, and other get out the vote reminders into traditional battleground states and also important expansion states like Mississippi, Louisiana & Missouri. In total, we reached almost 15 million voters. And we did all of this while also having the best SMS fundraising month ever in October.
We also built up a robust rapid response program that was able to reach voters in states like Arizona, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Georgia to inform them of voting information changing.
Portable Voter Ed Tools
This year, we also made at-your-fingertips voter education tools using our broadcast SMS capabilities. Our on-the-go “Voter Toolkit” took 50 states worth of state and precinct level data and made it instantly accessible to voters when they needed it, all with the tap of a finger.
VOTE or POLLS: To look up polling places, as well as open dates and times.
ID: Where voters can access info on their state’s voter ID requirements and how they can learn more.
CURBSIDE: For info on curbside voting availability in all 50 states
ASK, HOTLINE or QUESTION: To get connected with the Voter Assistance Hotline or accessible textline.
VOTER CORRESPONDENCE
With voter education outbound content comes the need to make sure we are responding to voters when they have questions! As such, voter correspondence was a key part to our success in making sure every voter had what they needed.
Accessible Text Line
An accessible voter textline staffed by 50 disability rights lawyers to answer voter education and voter protection inquiries from folks for whom the voice hotline is not accessible. (Fun fact -- we got a vendor, recruited and trained volunteers, and launched this textline in 72 hours!)
Voter Education Inbox
A voter assistance correspondence program. We created vote@dnc.org, an email inbox that all voter education email replies pointed towards, and staffed that inbox with a distributed volunteer team who answered questions, escalated issues to our voter protection team, and reported on trends.
Broadcast SMS Inbox
To complement the voter education and GOTV messages we sent out of our broadcast SMS program, we engaged a volunteer Mobile Commons Response Team to monitor our broadcast SMS inbox and answer questions about voting.
Altogether, these programs sent over 15,000 replies assisting voters!
VOTE TRIPLING
Knowing that Vote Tripling is a powerful organizing tool, especially in a year with record turnout before Election Day voting, we integrated the tactic across DNC programs:
Every peer to peer texting script included a vote tripling ask, and our broadcast SMS program regularly employed this tactic.
We created an “Already Voted” Action Kit that breaks down vote tripling and shares how to use it to organize one’s friends and family.
We also used our email organizing muscle to send this ask out to people who have already voted to get them to forward to their friends.
In total, our vote tripling asks reached over 1 million voters over email.
Job opportunities:
Today, I’d like to plug a post election digital debrief that we will be hosting in a few weeks. Please sign up to join us or even lead a session here.
🧵Thread we think you should read (and retweet) 🧵
Closing:
GOTV is my favorite holiday, it’s the most spirited time of the year, and a true culmination of why we do what we do. I have been so proud to do this work at the DNC and truly so thankful to you for reading about it today! Please share with your networks and reach out with questions.
Cheers,
Meg