best practices

Young Democrats of America had a scheduled conference call this afternoon on GOTyV strategies and best practices with a special appearance by Sen. Hillary Clinton, and I thought I'd share a bit about what was discussed.

YDA Political Director Tony Cani and YDA Executive Director Alexandra Acker both opened the call by discussing best practices for getting out the youth vote, as well as describing the YDA GOTV efforts in eight states. Both discussed the success of YDA's "Young Voter Revolution" campaign, which has created over 100,000 peer-to-peer contacts so far during this campaign.

The "best practice" emphasized the most was simply engaging friends and neighbors about the election, as each person definitely has the ability to play that part. Cani noted that many activists can get wrapped up in activities on the front lines and in campaign offices and forget about talking to those that are not as involved.

Other best practices included staying away from negative appeals and visualizing/planning the casting of the ballot. Cani noted that Millennials are turned off by language like, "Young people may not usually vote, but..." Instead, to jibe with the Millennials' desire to be a part of something bigger, the current collective participation by this generation should be emphasized. Acker then stepped in to discuss the importance of getting young people to visualize the process of casting a vote. Acker explained that this can be done through vote pledges and probing questions asking youth where they're going to vote, how they're going to get there, and when during the day they will do so. The intention is to assist young voters in planning their day around voting; this has proven to be successful in the past.

YDA officers are currently in eight states: Arkansas, Colorado, Ohio, California, Florida, Georgia, Utah, and Virginia. Acker outlined the efforts in a few of the states to give call participants a glimpse into what is happening on the ground.

• California: Local chapters have organized in Northern California to form a collaborative canvassing effort based out of Stockton, largely focused on rural areas. Acker noted that this was yielding the best quantitative results, saying that California's numbers were great and making it hard for any of the other efforts to compete.
• Colorado: The effort out of Boulder may be a bit surprising, Acker noted, because with Boulder containing the University of Colorado, the area is usually known as a "bastion of liberalism" within Colorado. Acker explained that even though this is usually the case, they weren't seeing much partisan activity on the ground. The YDA stepped in to strengthen GOTyV efforts for non-college youth.
• Arkansas and Utah: While neither state has been or will be a player in the presidential campaign, both states have YDA staff on the ground for several local races, in a primarily phone-based operation.

Before Sen. Clinton joined in, Cani reminded callers of YDA's voting reminder text messaging service. Youth can text "Vote Dem" to 35328 and get a reminder to vote on Election Day. Cani referenced the data showing that text message reminders improve turnout by nearly 5% (Mike wrote about this here).

Cani also explained a bit about the activity we would be seeing from YDA after the election. In odd-numbered years, YDA traditionally focuses on issue advocacy programs, and following this cycle, Cani said it wouldn't be any different. YDA will be providing support to Democratic legislators and other influential people by researching a few hand-picked issues deemed priorities by the organization.

Senator Clinton joined in after finishing a campaign event for Democratic candidate Bruce Lunsford in Kentucky. Clinton emphasized the importance of voting down-ballot among youth, pointing out that recent data showed 1 in 5 youth fail to vote in the local elections. Clinton expressed thanks for the support shown to both Sen. Obama's campaign and to her campaign in the primaries, but then said "we're in the World Series now," and that we must execute and get the job done.

Clinton fielded one question from a YDA member -- "What is the best way to keep people involved after the election, especially since we'll need lots of help with the problems we're facing?"

Clinton said that Democrats need an engaged, active Democratic National Committee to reach out to civic clubs in local communities and hold forums on campuses and discuss what the Democrats will be doing to solve the nation's problems. Sen. Clinton also reminded callers of the importance of recruiting good Democratic candidates for 2010 and 2012.

Just a quick note to point you all to a few new resources. First, The Young Voter PAC and Future Majority just released a workbook on best practices for mobilizing young voters:

Mobilize the Youth Vote - pdf

In it, you will find information on progressive youth organizations, definitions and best practices for running traditional and non-traditional field campaigns, sample budgets, strategies, and organizational plans, data on young voters and more.

This is a work in progress, and we will be adding to it substantially after the election. If you have questions that are not answered in this guide, or suggestions on further material we should include, please contact us.

Further, I wanted to point out the new and growing collection of election-related resources that now occupy the top slot in this blogs's sidebar. These will be listed on this site until November 5th. Here you can find voter registration deadlines, instructions on absentee voting for each state, help for overseas and military voters, a primer on student voting rights produced by the Brennen Center, and more. I hope to add more information soon about election protection, and if you have suggestions on good resources I should be linking to please contact me about that as well.

I promise, last time I'll post about Britney Spears and/or the MoveOn MTV ad buy. There's no solid data about whether or not humorous and/or pop culture heavy ads are effective, but Peter Levine has some interesting thoughts on the matter and it's worth it for everyone to be on the same page wrt best practices:

I am not aware of research or public data that would allow us to compare the effectiveness of a sarcastic or silly ad versus a serious and information-rich one. Nor have I seen evaluations of games that are designed to promote voting, whether the games are silly and parodic or challenging and educational. (The campaigns may have tested games and various broadcast messages, but they never share the data from such experiments.)

My hunch is that anyone who tries a very light approach is making a mistake. Remember that less than half of the youth population will vote. Heavily represented in that group are young people who are seriously concerned about issues, from their own economic prospects to the future of the planet. Voting is not much fun, but it is rewarding if one feels one can make a real difference by casting a ballot. Potential voters are likely to be people who believe they can make a difference, or at least are open to the argument that the election is important. This is true of all citizens, but young people are especially likely to say that they need more information and explanation before they can vote. Often, in focus groups and polls, they say that the main reason they may not vote is that they feel inadequately informed to make such a serious choice. Thus I suspect that an information-rich, explanatory ad or game could be very effective. But a jokey approach is likely to make young people feel that the election is unimportant (thus lowering turnout), or may offend them by patronizing them.

This doesn't rule out some use of humor and amusement in various media. But one should always take the audience seriously.

And just in case you haven't seen this yet: