For 20 years now, Project Vote has been on the front lines of voter engagement: working hard to bring meaningful voter registration assistance to youth, people of color, and lower-income Americans. Today, I want to draw your attention to a recent article that confirms how impactful this work is.
In field experiments dating back to 1998, Alan Gerber and Don Green, of Yale University and Columbia University respectively, found that a single in-person conversation boosted the likelihood that a voter would go to the polls by 20 percent. In the twenty years since, academics and campaigns have tested various voter outreach methods, and the same holds true: the most effective way to turn out voters is with high-quality, face-to-face conversations.
That’s right: Meaningful, interpersonal engagement is the key. Successful voter engagement can create lifelong voters, and that’s an unparalleled impact for voting rights organizations and the donors who support them.
And yet over the last three election cycles, SuperPACs have spent more than 80 percent of their budgets on television ads (almost $1.2 billion in 2014 alone), and less than 5 percent of funds went toward fieldwork. But there’s little evidence that television ads increase voter turnout.
Given such a disparity between funding and impact, why do campaigns invest so little in the ground game?
Voter engagement work makes significant demands on campaigns and organizations in the way of recruitment, training, and management. And when campaign consultants are getting a cut of ad fees, it’s easy to see how campaigns are giving up the ground. In the battle of campaign funding, easy money is winning out over smart money. Voters are losing out, as are donors looking to make a significant impact.
Planning, implementing, and managing voter engagement field programs is Project Vote’s area of expertise, so we were grateful to hear that the work we believe in continues to be the most effective way to increase voter participation. And we wanted to take a moment to share this information with you—the people who make our work possible.
During the 2014 midterm season, Project Vote was on the ground leading cost-effective, data-driven, multi-state voter registration and get out the vote field experiments to determine: which combination of voter registration (including mail and/or canvass) and GOTV (including mail and/or canvass) outreach is most cost-effective at generating votes; which methods are most effective for particular subgroups of the population (e.g., youth, women, Latinos); whether site-based voter registration solicitations increase voter registration rates; and whether or not they are more effective when timed before a canvass and mail registration program or after.
Over the next year, Project Vote will work with the Analyst Institute to conduct a thorough analysis of our efforts, but we can share some preliminary results.
We were able to collect 1,443 applications through our site-based registration campaign, and 3,948 applications during our door-to-door canvas. Our canvassers’ message was positive, motivating, and simple: Make A Promise. Make A Choice. Vote. More than 1,900 GOTV canvasser shifts resulted in 114,625 doors knocked, and 71 percent of those canvassed made a commitment to vote.
We know this year’s program wasn’t the most expansive field effort we’ve undertaken. Instead, it was a set of complex, thoughtful registration and GOTV experiments that involved a quarter of a million Americans divided into sixteen different treatment groups, as well as a control group. The research findings will ensure that future voter engagement programs are the most cost-effective, strategic use of your philanthropic dollars.
This research isn’t just a validation of our work, but it’s also a validation of you, the philanthropic community, and of your choice to support strategic, targeted, and meaningful voter engagement.
As we close out yet another election year, we remain committed to expanding opportunities for historically underrepresented citizens to register and vote. Thank you for making our work possible.