A Power Grab by the People

Today, we’re formally launching People’s Power Grab – an unprecedented online voter registration and mobilization program working in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Texas. We hope to reach young people and voters of color across those states with sustained empowerment and informational content throughout 2020 in order to help change hearts and minds about civic participation, and ultimately register over 100,000 new voters.

Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Texas are each states with enormous communities of unregistered voters – particularly young people and people of color – and the voting disparities between these communities and their older, whiter counterparts is unacceptable. Let me break it down: 
According to Census data, in 2018 nearly 70% of white citizens of voting-age in these four states were registered to vote – but only 34% of latinx, 38% of asian and 59% black citizens of voting-age were registered. According to the same data, only 47% of young people ages 18-24 were registered to vote, compared with 76% of people age 65+. 

As a woman of color, I can attest that these disparities aren’t completely our fault – and there are very real barriers and reasons why people in our communities do not vote. People’s Power Grab is taking a different approach to registering and mobilizing our audience. We want to engage communities over time with locally-informed and culturally competent content to provide reasons for why it’s important to vote, and inform people about the process – two often cited reasons for non-voting. 

We’ll be reaching our audiences where they are – online and on their mobile devices – using platforms like Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. The program will draw from key learnings from our voter registration work in 2018 and 2017 – enabling us to reach voters efficiently at the lowest possible cost. In the past, our testing has shown that deadline driven and official looking creative perform best when directly asking for registrations. We’ve also learned that delivering registration asks during the week – and not on date night- leads to more registrations.

On top of that, we’ve developed relationships in our target states with organizations doing the on-the-ground voter registration and mobilization work to help inform our campaigns to be as relevant as possible. We’ll be testing each of our strategies with scientific methodology whenever possible to make sure that what we are doing works, and don’t worry – we plan on sharing what we learn with the movement .

Are you working in AZ, FL, GA, or TX and have cool ideas for content we should try?  Are you a measurement nerd who wants to geek out over numbers and testing methodology? Are you interested in funding this work ? AMAZING! Get in touch: Tatenda@anotheracronym.org

Tatenda Musapatike is a Senior Director of Campaigns at ACRONYM, leading the People’s Power Grab program.