The COVID-19 pandemic presented a host of challenges to voting and a necessary shift in voter contact programs. Deliver My Vote (DMV) provided guidance and support to a number of non-partisan organizations seeking to pivot to voter contact that assisted voters with absentee voting.
In Pennsylvania's Spring 2020 Election, DMV partnered with the Voter Participation Center and Center for Voter Information on a Randomized Control Trial that showed a 1.7% increase in ballot return rate after DMV callers had spoken to a voter. Later that year, DMV worked with partners to scale that work.
Beginning in August 2020, Deliver My Vote (DMV) partnered with the The Voter Project (PA), Engage Michigan, the Progress Florida Education Institute, and national partners, ProgressNow and America Votes to contact and support traditionally disenfranchised and low-propensity absentee voters. We used live phone calls and SMS messaging from trained organizers to provide a human element to mail and digital communication. DMV callers worked to make personal vote plans with voters. Once the vote plan was made, DMV and partner groups collaboratively reached back to the voter until their ballot was successfully cast.
Deliver My Vote provided infrequent voters with solutions and confidence. In the five weeks leading up to Election Day, we made over 6.4 million live calls and sent over 4 million SMS messages. Our canvassers had in-depth conversations with over 163,000 target voters and made detailed vote plans, including specific dates and times, with over 41,000 of them. Each of those voters then received follow up calls and texts from organizers to support the execution of their personal vote plan.
DMVEF received a re-grant at the end of November to run digital programming in Wisconsin. We reached out to state partners America Votes and Priorities USA to identify areas where there were gaps in engagement and to ensure our messaging aligned with current guidance due to shifts in Wisconsin’s VBM landscape. Using insights from these conversations, we identified Michigan universities with high percentages of BIPOC students, and subsequently decided to target populations aged 18-30 in Milwaukee and Madison. We designed two creatives and launched a two-part digital campaign on November 1 on Facebook and Instagram and traditional display to optimize a balance between general impressions and slightly more impactful social media impressions with the budget we had available. In order to maximize our impact and reach, we added an additional layer of audio streaming targeting Black men and digital display ads targeting the Hmong community on the online Twin Cities-based Hmong Times.
DMVEF ran a digital program on Facebook and Instagram in the days before the Georgia runoff. Based on conversations with Georgia partners, we knew that more densely populated metropolitan areas were being targeted for field outreach, likely due to the ease of canvassing and ability to reach a large number of people. We identified majority-Black rural counties with populations of less than 30k: Burke, Calhoun, Clay, Dooly, Early, Hancock, Jefferson, Macon, Quitman, Randolph, Stewart, Sumter, Talbot, Taliaferro, Terrell, Warren, and Washington counties, and targeted ages 18-65+. We launched ads on November 28 with two graphics, to ensure that voters understood their voting options in the short period allowed for early voting and to encourage absentee ballot return. When early voting ended on December 2, we transitioned to a single graphic containing Election Day information.
DMV launched a small digital buy to support our partnership work with 1000 Women Strong. We developed 2 creatives focused on absentee ballot chaseand status check, and deployed them to two zip codes identified by 1000 Women Strong. In Pennsylvania, the zip code we were given did not have a large enough population alone, so we added the zip code where the DMVEF Party At The Polls would be taking place in Philadelphia in partnership with 1000 Women Strong and When We All Vote.
