About us
Empowering grassroots volunteers to send personal, heartfelt letters encouraging fellow Americans to vote.
What we do
Vote Forward is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization that empowers grassroots volunteers to send handwritten letters encouraging fellow Americans to vote. The majority of our letter-writing campaigns are nonpartisan campaigns, supporting our core 501c(3) and 501c(4) social-welfare mission, which focus on mobilizing potential voters in historically marginalized communities—such as people of color, women, and young voters. We also support 501(c)(4) partisan campaigns to encourage likely-Democratic voters to turn out in strategic states and districts.
285k+
Volunteers powering this work
40M+
Handwritten letters sent to voters
25+
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conducted & publicly shared
Our approach
Volunteer-powered
Our volunteers are a mix of experienced activists and new volunteers inspired by letter writing: In 2020, more than one-third of surveyed letter writers had never volunteered for a civic or political cause before Vote Forward.
Collaborative
We’re making letter writing available to the broader pro-democracy movement. Vote Forward has powered efforts by a diverse coalition of 100+ organizations—nonprofits, faith-based organizations, companies, political groups, and more—providing our platform and support at zero cost to them.
Evidence-driven
Vote Forward has tested the effectiveness of its letters on voter turnout more than 25 times over the past six years, and measured a positive impact nearly every time. Learn more about our experiments here.
Scalable
Our team can quickly launch and grow impactful letter writing campaigns—targeting anywhere from thousands to millions of potential voters—while supporting the thousands of grassroots volunteers who power them.
Our Partners
Our origin story
Vote Forward began in 2017 as an experiment conducted by Scott Forman in Alabama, where he sent 1,000 letters to encourage voters in the special U.S. Senate election.
Encouraged by the success of that test, Scott and a small group of friends and colleagues built the first version of this platform to allow volunteers to take easy and effective action in future elections. We’re so proud of how this community has grown over the years—and the impact we’ve achieved together.
As seen in:
Support our work
To make a contribution to Vote Forward, please donate online via ActBlue or contact Sam Hall, Development Director, at [email protected].
Want to learn more?
For questions about letters, check out our help site or chat bot. If you are unable to find an answer, you can email [email protected] for support.