Declare Yourself

In this mildly inappropriate version of the classic School House Rock, a girl turns eighteen and learns how to lose her voting virginity.

Register to vote at http://www.declareyourself.com

In keeping with my post earlier this week about the need for more investment in communications work within youth organizing, I want to point you all to a 1170 word profile of Television producer/major donor Norman Lear and his youth vote organization Declare Yourself.

Here are the main messages coming out of the piece:

Declare Yourself, which Mr. Lear founded in 2003 to spur 18- to 29-year-olds to vote, strives to register more than two million people by Election Day. A nonprofit organization, it registered about a million voters in the months leading up to the 2004 election, most of them that October, said Aviva Rosenthal, the organization’s director of partnerships.

...

Four years ago Declare Yourself was simply one of many voter-registration efforts, admirable but probably without huge impact.

Message: 1 million voters is "not a significant impact" and by implication, youth in general did not have a huge impact in 2004.

Young people could be more crucial in the presidential race this time around — they played a bigger role than normal in many primary contests, and the campaign of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has the trappings of a youth crusade. Thus organizations like Declare Yourself are taking on extra weight.

Message: Youth organizations weren't important until Barack Obama showed up. We didn't make him, he made us.

Rival registration efforts abound, but Declare Yourself is perhaps alone in using big media (anything controlled by the five largest media conglomerates) as its primary sales tool. Rock the Vote, which rose to prominence in the 1992 election by teaming up with MTV, comes close with its emphasis on musicians, but it has started relying more heavily on Internet outreach than on television.

This is bizarrely wrong. I would say that Rock the Vote and Declare Yourself are equally partnering with major media corporations. Both organization's biggest program this year involves online voter registration. If anything, Rock the Vote is the more innovative of the two organizations with new ways to using it's corporate and celebrity partnerships to increase registration. In reading the piece, however, the implication is that Declare Yourself's strategy is in some way superior.

Message: Corporate partnerships and Media are more important than internet outreach.

Mr. Lear toils to line up celebrities who have cachet among young adults. Through his wide-ranging contacts, he has corralled a roster of stars popular with young people to plug the cause, including America Ferrera (“Ugly Betty”), Hayden Panettiere (“Heroes”) and Tyra Banks (“America’s Next Top Model”). He said that he was trying to sign up the Jonas Brothers.

One of Declare Yourself’s biggest coups involved the MTV reality series “The Hills.” Mr. Lear and Ms. Rosenthal arranged for a star of that show to mention the registration effort during filming. As it turned out, producers liked the story line so much that they devoted the bulk of an episode to registering to vote.
...
Citing internal research, Marc Morgenstern, executive director of Declare Yourself, said 83 percent of the people the organization registered in 2004 voted. “Yes, young people are assaulted with messages,” Mr. Morgenstern said. “That is why we have an overlapping approach. The cumulative impact gets them to the tipping point.”

Message: Celebrities and media campaigns are the best way to reach young voters.

At the moment, though, he is most focused on Declare Yourself. Whether registration efforts reap votes is a question that the organization cannot answer with precision. And as excited as registration groups, campaigns and others get about supposedly surging interest among younger voters every four years, the gains rarely prove to be substantial. The turnout rate in the last presidential election among voters 18 to 25 was 47 percent, according to the Pew Research Center, compared with 64 percent for the overall population.

Message: Young people don't vote and we have no idea how to make them vote in bigger numbers.

This piece is a disaster. It flies in the face of everything we know:

• Young Voters have turned out in larger and larger numbers for the past 3 election cycles, and we were the only age demographic to vote in favor of John Kerry.
• Peer to peer outreach is the gold standard for moving young voters to the polls and it's effectiveness has been proven.
• Celebrity campaigns in and of themselves do not increase youth turnout.
• The internet is a huge and important tool for reaching out and engaging young voters.
• Youth organizations engaged in peer to peer outreach pioneered the tactics and laid the groundwork for Obama's successful youth operation.

This New York Times profile may serve the purpose of raising the profile of Declare Yourself and Norman Lear, but it does very little to advance the goals of the growing progressive youth movement. In fact, it is actively working at cross-purposes to that movement and teaching journalists and anyone who reads it precisely the wrong lessons about youth vote outreach.

• PBS did a huge segment on the youth vote with Heather Smith of Rock the Vote, Sujatha Jahagirdar of PIRG, and three students each supporting one of the remaining candidates. For my money, Sujatha had the best line in the piece:
  
  But the real story here is that young people have been turning out for many election cycles. In fact, in 2004, youth turnout increased by more than 11 percent, which was almost triple the increase we saw in the general population.

  So what we hope we see this election cycle is the permanent death of the notion that young people don't vote and young people don't matter. - PBS

• The National Campus Voter Registration Project has launched Your Vote, Your Voice, a project to help students register their peers on campus. - Chronicle of Higher Education
• Scotty McClellan's new book is the talk of the town and everyone has blogged it today. For my money, Glenn Greenwald has the best take in this post which skewers the media reaction. - Salon
• All three remaining candidates have joined forces to release a (toothless) statement about Darfur. - TPM Election Central
• Clinton backers plan to protest at the game-deciding Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting this Saturday. - Washington Post
• With less than one week to go, Obama appears to be "banking" super delegates for a big announcement. - Political Wire
• Whatever happened to the Jena 6? - AlterNet
• The VA continues to downplay the seriousness of PTSD. - Vet Voice
• Declare Yourself has released a book in which celebrities discuss why they will vote. Not too sure how I feel about this. Seems a little silly and superficial, but if it sells copies and convinces people to go to the polls then yay on them. - Declare Yourself
• The latest craze at Oberlin College? Competitive sustainable living. - New York Times
• GRITtv interviews a soldier who was stop-lossed. - FireDogLake

I don't know what's in the air or water today, but my inbox is piled high with news from nonpartisan, "c3" youth organizations: Rock the Vote, Voto Latino, HeadCount, and WireTap. It seems like they all decided that today was the day for product launches.

Here's a rundown:

• Rock the Vote is following in the footsteps of MTV's Street Team '08 project and is looking to hire a few citizen journalists. The program is called "Rock the Trail," and it is being conducted in partnership with WireTap Magazine and BET, all of which will cross post journalist submissions. AT&T is the mobile partner for the project. A panel of expert judges will determine who the lucky winners are. The pay is a very small $500 per month stipend, but they hook you up with a lot of gear. Applications are due by May 7th.
• Voto Latino is making a similar play. They've partnered with SiTV and CNN to find two aspiring journalists to cover the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. They're project, dubbed Crash the Parties is a little more participatory. Applicants must sign up for a profile on the Crash the Parties website and submit a video explaining why they deserve to cover the two party conventions. Other applicants and registered users can vote on the contestants. The winners are determined by a combination of votes and the input of a judges panel that includes Rosario Dawson, Craig Newmark and Steve Grove. Applications are due by May 6th.
• Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) just launched a new site, GI Bill 2008, in support of the bill of the same name. I noticed that my congressperson has not yet signed on in support of the bill and just sent her a message.
• The full version of A Call To Action, the documentary about HeadCount (which we've blogged about numerous times in the past) was released on iClips today. It's a little confusing, but the links on the right sidebar a "chapter" titles that let you skip around within the documentary.

In other news:

• The American Prospect is looking for a few good writing fellows. The pay is low(ish), but alumns have gone on to bigger and better things at the Washington Post, Salon, The Nation and more. Applications are due May 1st.
• Some old Dodd folks sent me this:
  

  WASHINGTON, DC – Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), Chairman of the Senate Committee Banking Committee and senior Democrat on the Senate Education Committee, will hold a hearing tomorrow to examine how the recent turmoil in U.S. credit markets is affecting the cost and availability of student loans. Witnesses will testify on how the tightening of credit, a result of the subprime mortgage crisis, may make it more difficult for some student lenders to provide educational loans for students and their families.

A few weeks back, I wrote a post about the number of new voters that had registered using the Rock the Vote/CREDO Action Widget and the Declare Yourself online registration form. At the time, I noted that all together over half a million new young voters had been registered this cycle.

This was incorrect.

Those figures did not represent the total number of registrations, but rather the total number of people who had accessed one of the two online registration tools and downloaded the registration form. As of yet there are no confirmed numbers for how many new voters actually complete the registration process.

For what it is worth, I’m told that somewhere between 70 to 80 percent of people do complete the registration process by election day (based on numbers from 2004).

In the last week I've spoken to people from Declare Yourself and Rock the Vote, the two nonpartisan organizations making a major push to register voters via online registration. So far, it looks like they are both kicking ass and taking names.

According to Rock the Vote, as of Thursday over 300,000 18-29 year olds had used the RTV/CREDO Action widget to register young voters. About another 123,000 voters older than 30 had also registered via the tool. According to Declare Yourself, 260,000 young people have registered via their website so far this cycle.

That means that over half a million new young voters were added to the rolls so far this cycle. In 2004, Rock the Vote registered 1.2 million new young voters, 800,000 of which went to the polls. It's barely February and they've already achieved 1/4 of their previous total. And the folks at Declare Yourself believe that they are on track to exceed their stated target of 2 million new young voters.

This is huge for Democrats and for the youth vote community.

Yes, it's true. Somewhat apropos of Alice's post about Playboy on MySpace, I'm now luring people to the website with images of scantily clad women (but thankfully not Obama Girl).

Actually, this is one of four new PSAs from Declare Yourself and the folks behind Reno 911. These videos are almost as good as the last batch and still about ten cuts above the rest of the field when it comes to PSAs aimed to increase civic engagement among young people. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like they're making that much of a splash.

Looking at the number of views for each of the previous four videos, none of them are above a few thousand. Fairly paltry for what looks to be a pretty good attempt at creating a viral video, and leading me to wonder what other distribution outlets they're using. Are these videos just sitting on YouTube, or are they pushing them through outlets other than their (presumably old) email list?

And why not run these on TV? Norman Lear, the money man behind Declare Yourself is an old TV-producer and responsible for some of the biggest hits in latter half of the 20th C. He's got the money to afford some pretty ambitious ad-buys between now and November 2008. And he's got the smarts to know that, for all the buzz about the internet, kids still do watch TV. Maybe they're waiting for the fall when everyone is back at school and we start to approach the 2007 election, but why not by some ads during the Daily Show or Adult Swim?

More new videos after the jump.

I just got this in the mail from Declare Yourself, a nonpartisan youth voter registration outfit:

We know what some of you might be thinking...

Youth voting campaigns seem like a dime a dozen. Start with an election cycle. Add equal parts celebrity, earnestness and cool T-shirts. Just add water ... and stir it up.

Not this time. Not this year.

The growing list of stars, athletes and artists we've brought together is unprecedented in the history of our country. The best part? Each one of them wants to do something special, something major, something unforgettable to get every 18-year-old to register and vote in the 2008 presidential election.

We can't wait to see what they come up with. Can you?

See which celebrities and influencers are powered up to get you to register and vote.

Check out www.DeclareYourself.com.

So let me get this straight:

• Youth campaigns are a dime a dozen? Way to denigrate the efforts of thousands of other people in your field and all of their hard work. This is not a zero-sum competition to see who can register the most voters. Everyone should be working together.
• Other youth campaigns suck because they use celebrities and witty slogans, but our campaign is super cool because we have the most celebrities? Awesome message. You should vote because we have more famous people telling you to do shit than the other guy.
  
  I've never been a believer in the idea that young people vote because celebrities tell them too. They vote because celebrities create a change within a cultural community. They open a space whereby participation becomes acceptable where once it wasn't. It's a subtle but important difference. It's the line between condescension and respect. It's also the difference between a broadcast strategy that talks at people, and a more peer-to-peer strategy that recognizes the celebrity as a catalyst for a much longer process that culminates in politicization and participation. Declare Yourself's message here is on the wrong side of that line.
• And what exactly is the message here? Oh yeah - it's "I'm writing to tell you that eventually celebrities are going to tell you to vote. And the way they do it will blow your mind." That is a useless message. I can't do anything with that. You just cluttered my inbox and didn't even ask me to register to vote or tell my friends to register, ostensibly the purpose of your organization.

I'm a big fan of the PSAs that Declare Yourself put together a few weeks ago. They were a step in the right direction in terms of tone and content. This email was a step backwards in the wrong direction.

Sidenote: Apparently Ivanka Trump is in the running to be one of the moderators for the MySpace debates. Folks at Declare Yourself, you are partners with MySpace. If this is true, please do everything in your power to prevent this.

I have to confess, I didn't think much of Declare Yourself in 2004. They barely registered on the radar among youth organizations that year, and I found their Declaration of Independence Tour to be exceedingly lame. Sure, they get a lot of folks registered to vote, but all the registration in the world between 1993 and 2003 didn't get more young people voting. I tend to think that you need to give people a reason to vote. Sometimes the political environment (read: Bush, Iraq, Katrina) can provide that reason, and sometimes partisan messages can help provide that.

I also usually dislike PSAs, which tend to try way too hard to be cool and just end up being uninspiring. Most of the time they end up making political participation seem even less cool or relevant.

But these new ads done by Declare Yourself and the folks behind Reno 911 are pretty damn good, and they just might make me change my mind about Declare Yourself. They certainly make me want to get my ass to the ballot box.

I guess I'll have to keep a close eye on what Declare Yourself does this year. Particularly with their voter registration partnership with MySpace (There will be some interesting comparisons to be made in December 2008 between the Rock the Vote voter registration widget and the MySpace/Declare Yourself partnership.

More videos after the jump.

So MySpace has launched a new area dedicated to the 2008 election. Called MySpace Impact, the site will link to candidates "official" web profiles, allow MySpace users to donate to the candidates (not yet a live feature), and resurrect MySpace's ill-fated voter registration partnership with Norman Lear's Declare Yourself.

Fred Stutzman at Tech President mostly nails it on why this is a pretty lame development. But here's a couple thoughts of my own.