What we learned: Using technology to help our volunteers organize and grow
Here at Vote Forward, we had a very common problem for a nonprofit organization: a great product (our online letter writing platform) and a fantastic user base (over 285,000), but limited internal resources to meet our scale goals. Fortunately, we also had a unique asset: a network of highly dedicated, self-motivated volunteers who were already organizing and growing on their own. All they needed was the technology to support it.
Leaning into a distributed organizing model, we decided to develop a tool to help our volunteers write letters together. Our aim was to increase the number of people involved in letter writing, knowing that we wouldn’t be able to expand our internal team’s capacity at the same pace. A self-service tool that could harness volunteers’ excitement—without overloading our highly-scaled, volunteer-run help desk during peak season—was the solution.
Vote Forward’s new personal letter writing pages (or PLPs, for short) made it easy for any of our volunteers to create a custom page, set a goal for total letters written, and invite friends to join in working toward that goal. Our team of seasoned help desk volunteers made this product possible by approving new pages and responding to volunteers’ questions about the tool—another testament to the power of distributed organizing.
Here’s what we learned from the 2024 election cycle:
Simple online tools can help scale offline actions in a big way—if done right. Our volunteers created more than 2,700 personal letter-writing pages with new users accounting for over 40% of those joining or starting PLPs. A simple, customizable landing page with a goal thermometer and a leaderboard made each page feel special and shareable for our volunteers.
Understand the volunteers using your tool—but also those they’ll be recruiting.The tool created a fun opportunity for existing volunteers to celebrate their work and an inviting option for new volunteers to join in the fun with a peer-to-peer invitation. Understanding the needs of both these types of users was critical. If we had built a goal-setting page that our volunteers were excited to set up but the people they invited had no interest in contributing to their goal, our product would not have been successful. Don’t skip your user research with all of the types of users who will be using your tool!
Timing is key. In October of a major election year, our volunteers were eager to do more and jumped at the opportunity to use PLPs to expand their impact—and feel proud of their collective contributions. With such a strong start to PLPs, we’re excited to build on the tool for subsequent elections.
Our community has written over 40 million letters to voters since 2017—and we couldn’t be more proud. We believe our research-backed letter writing campaigns can deliver even more impact with wider adoption, and we’re so excited to see the joy—and impact—of letter writing grow through these collective efforts.