History of impact
We test and scale innovative, high-impact tactics that engage Americans in voting.
Our track record
Vote Forward began in 2017 with a randomized controlled trial (RCT), which demonstrated that personal, handwritten letters can effectively encourage fellow citizens to turn out to vote. We’ve since grown into an organization that regularly and rigorously tests new, measurable, volunteer-driven strategies to engage and mobilize voters at scale—and a community of thousands of grassroots supporters who power these efforts.
We’ve tested the effectiveness of our letters on voter turnout more than 25 times through RCTs (the gold standard in research), often measuring a positive impact. In our pursuit of innovation, we transparently share our learnings with the public. To read about our 2024 election results, see here.
Our process
Test design
Lead 25+ randomized controlled trials (RCTs) designed by research scientists
Target selection
Identify elections that matter most to democracy, per our data and political experts
Volunteer action
Support 285k+ volunteers sending over 40M letters to voters
Voter contact
Reach targeted voters with Vote Forward handwritten letters or other forms of outreach
Voter participation
Voters head to the polls, vote by mail, register to vote, or otherwise engage
Election outcomes
Rigorously test the impact of our experiments on voter turnout and share the results
Our proof points
Scale
Since 2017, Vote Forward has written over 40 million letters to voters with the help of over 285,000 volunteers.
Rigor
We’ve conducted dozens of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and publicly shared the results each time.
Impact
Twenty out of 25 of our experiments have shown a positive (non-null) effect on voter turnout, providing evidence that letter writing has made a material difference in a range of municipal, statewide, and national elections over the past eight years. Three highlights demonstrating the power of letter writing include:
- Vote Forward’s first letter-writing experiment—in a 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate in Alabama—boosted voter turnout by a massive 3.4 percentage points, twice the margin of victory.
- In 2020, Vote Forward’s first presidential-year experiment found that handwritten letters increased voter turnout by 0.5 to 0.8 percentage points. Over 200,000 volunteers sent more than 17.6 million letters—resulting in an estimated 126,000 additional votes in key states. (For context: That’s almost half of the combined margin by which Joe Biden won six battleground states.) This made letter writing one of the most effective voter turnout tactics measured in a presidential election.
- We've conducted voter turnout experiments over three Virginia statewide election cycles (2019, 2021, and 2023) and measured positive results in each one.
Letter writing has proven effective in influencing voter behavior, but its impact has declined in recent midterm and presidential elections—including 2024—due to a noisier environment and oversaturation of the tactic.
We’re now focused on refining letters where they remain effective (in “low-salience” elections with low information and low turnout) and using our creativity and testing capacity to identify and validate the next big thing in voter contact.
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