Building on insights drawn from ACRONYM’s successful 2017 and 2018 online voter registration and mobilization programs that helped to register over 50,000 new voters across rising American electorate and battleground states across the country and established new best practices for finding and registering new and infrequent voters where they are online, ACRONYM is launching the People’s Power Grab to continue this critical work in advance of the 2020 election cycle.

People’s Power Grab is an online voter registration and mobilization program designed to empower communities in Arizona, Texas, Florida, and Georgia to claim their voice in government through civic participation. Historically, online campaigns have approached the voter registration and mobilization space through urgency deadlines and social pressure narratives, which often do not resonate with many unregistered voters because there are closely held beliefs or systems driving non-participation. We hope to break through to these unregistered voters by implementing a long-term, coordinated effort to educate and persuade unregistered people where they get their information online to register and vote in the 2020 elections.

Some of those tactics include: voter ID requirements, voter disenfranchisement practices, restrictions pertaining to the submission of voter registration forms, and the slow update of the voter file from Secretaries of State.

Within these challenges, online voter registration (OVR) and mobilization programs face their own set of challenges:

• The scattered levels of digital sophistication from Secretaries of State
• The non-traditional execution of measurement programs vis-a-vis field and mail measurement practices
• The endemic lack of coordination between field groups and existing digital media spenders.
• Traditionally short calendars of engagement

People’s Power Grab will break through these challenges by testing the efficacy of commercial marketing tactics for online voter registration in each state. While the specific tactics will vary per state based on the political landscape - overall the program seeks to test replicating commercial marketing tactics for the online voter registration and mobilization space; specifically full funnel marketing tactics and the use of offline and online data to inform message delivery.

Fill the void of online voter registration through mobilization programs. Although each state has a number of groups working on voter registration and mobilization programs, none of those state based organizations have online voter registration advertising programs and few have online advertising mobilization programs. The OVR work that occurs in the states is primarily attributable to national group spending. Additionally, the creative is typically limited to imagery like state flags (that have not been found to be most effective) and more narrow calls-to-action.

Create tools connected to a data backend to bring people into the program and then retarget them based on their actions. Through utilizing our own tools for each stage of our programs we can be extremely methodical about ingesting our data, appropriately sourcing our data, creating audiences with that data, and matching that data back to a file. If successful, this will position ACRONYM as a foremost thought leader for online voter registration and mobilization through our proprietary tech and data infrastructure that allows for integration from voter registration all the way through to mobilization.

Run awareness and consideration content (same as educational content) to change overall sentiment ahead of direct response OVR or mobilization ads. No organization we are aware of is running a full-funnel messaging strategy for online voter registration. Commercial marketers spend billions of dollars each year on improving their brand, because they understand that spending on brand advertising leads to a higher return on profit. There has been very little work to understand if the same idea, priming audiences with favorable messages, can work for online voter registration and mobilization programs. This same funnel naturally exists for candidate campaigns where campaigns spend significant media dollars on persuasion advertising prior to mobilizing identified supporters. We want to understand if this tactic can help increase the number of registrations or decrease the cost of registrations overall with our targets. A great deal of evidence from other industries exists proving that full funnel brand marketing is profitable, so it is time we see if these strategies are applicable for civic participation programs.

Interested in investing in programs like People’s Power Grab? Send us an email.