Sexy Politics and Voter Virgins

Update: A colleague emailed me to remind me of Votergasm, a website which received upwards of 800k unique views and had 40k people sign their pledge in 2004.
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Politics is boring. If you're reading this blog, you probably disagree with that statement, but there's a few million 18 - 29 year olds who would be happy to agree. So how do you get those folks informed? How do you get them to the ballot box? More than that, how do you make politics fun and interesting and relevant for those millions who just aren't going to walk a canvass or spend their Wednesday night yelling at O'Reilly or laughing it up with Stephen Colbert? Two organizations - one old and one new - have hit on somewhat similar solutions: sex it up with unconventional messages that are more appealing and interesting than typical political messages, but also educational.

The old organization is Voter Virgin, which was started in 2004 by Teresa Van Deusen of Austin, TX. Like so many political outsiders in 2003, Teresa looked around and saw many of her peers reluctant to engage the political process, and many political organizations more interested yelling about the latest outrage than making their activism inclusive and fun (read: culturally relevant to those who haven't drunk the political kook-aid). To her mind, there was a distinct lack of fun in political participation.

Her response was to create Voter Virgin, a voter registration and messaging outfit that used suggestive tag lines like "Everybody's doing it!" and "Because your first time should be special," to hook young voters attention and register them to vote. The name itself was chosen not only because of the way it lent itself to messaging, but because van Deusen thought the term would be radioactive to overly cautious campaigns (hence they would not be able to hijack it).

Working on a limited budget raised mostly through friends and family - and with no tax status or business model - Voter Virgin provided messaging materials to 85 different organizations, ranging from the well-funded national organizations like the New Voters Project on down to a small local group in Idaho that registered voters waiting on movie ticket lines. Over 150,000 people downloaded voter registration forms from the group's website in 2004, and Van Deusen herself personally registered 940 people in Austin.

In 2004, Voter Virgin's materials increased the effectiveness of hundreds of youth organizers. They are now ramping back up for 2008, and this time, they won't be the only game in town.

Competing with them will be Sexy Politics, a new SFW site that plays like it's NSFW, and uses that sex appeal to educate young people about politics. Part Quiz, part social network, part blog, the site (still in beta) is a little difficult to explain, so I'll let them do so for me:

They've also got a pretty good YouTube channel putting out videos like this McCain remix:

There are some fundamental differences between these two organizations. Voter Virgin had tangible accomplishments in 2004 - materials delivered, voters registered, registration forms downloaded. Ultimately, it found an out of the box way to successfully message civic engagement. Sexy Politics, on the other hand, has a much softer goal of educating and awareness building. It skirts a fine line between being engaging and informative or devolving into a mere novelty item selling politics (like so much in our society) with sex, but offering little real involvement or education.

On the other hand, judging by the success of sites like OK Cupid (Quizes,dating, etc.), Sexy Politics has the potential to reach a far greater audience if it's social platform takes off. It will be interesting to watch, compare, and contrast the activity on these two sites during the next 8 months.