A look at what’s ahead
I wanted to open a window into how we're thinking about Vote Forward’s efforts this year and next. With The Big Send in the increasingly-distant past and the midterm elections just over 16 months away (although they’ll be here sooner than you think), it's an “in-between” time for all of us—a time when it might be tempting to take a break.
But at Vote Forward, we haven't skipped a beat. We’ve already launched six campaigns this year, with even more in the works for 2022. Why? Because democracy doesn’t maintain itself. It requires active participation from all of us. As we face growing threats to basic democratic norms, we believe it's our responsibility to mobilize participation that is broader, deeper, and more sustained than ever.
To meet this challenge, this year we've been testing some big new ideas under the umbrella of our Vote Forward Labs program. Having demonstrated time and again since my first experiment with handwritten letters in 2017 that the tactic works, our goal now is to refine and improve this and other approaches to mobilizing voters over the long haul. Here are some of the Vote Forward experiments we've already run this year, designed and executed by my extraordinary colleagues, and powered by the energy and enthusiasm of volunteers like you:
We’ve already shown we can energize voters during an election; now, we aim to keep them engaged between elections. Following the 2020 election, we ran a big campaign to say "Thank you for voting!" to more than 280,000 first-time and infrequent voters in Virginia and Georgia. This was our first big test addressing the question "Can we keep voters engaged throughout the entire election cycle?"
Our letters are successful partly because they rely on the power of authentic, person-to-person contact. To develop this aspect even further, we tested a mail-based version of an approach called "vote tripling," in which letter recipients were encouraged to recruit friends and family to vote. We also tested highly-personal narrative handwritten messages against messages written under our standard, less specific guidance.
Voters are not a monolith, and it’s critical for us to learn how to engage specific communities, especially those who are traditionally underrepresented. We tried out English/Spanish bilingual letters in collaboration with our partner organization Voto Latino, and we're planning an even bigger version of this for the mayoral elections in Miami and Atlanta this fall.
We've just launched our biggest campaign of the year—a combination of absentee ballot encouragement letters in September and "Please vote!" letters in October—to activate voters for Virginia’s general election. Having demonstrated the effectiveness of these messages separately, we're now investigating the effect of combining them in multiple waves of communications.
These are just a few of the ways we’re moving forward with Vote Forward’s ambitious research agenda, and we're excited to continue learning and innovating in the years ahead. By continuing to experiment, we can provide you with the most effective actions you can take as volunteers, and help amplify the impact of our partner organizations and peers in the broader community.
Before you know it, we'll be in 2022. In 2020, we were able to accomplish a massively ambitious program. The details will depend on what we find in all of our experiments this year, but based on some back-of-the-envelope calculations, we think we may aim to facilitate even more voter contacts next year. With your support, we’re excited to aim for something even bigger.
Our small team is hard at work developing new campaigns, analyzing data, and working to improve the letter writing experience for volunteers like you! If you can, please consider making a contribution to help keep our work going.