Outvote Can Help Your Friends AND Your Campaign
Next up in our tour of tech tools, an awesome new app from Outvote that helps you find friends who need an extra push to vote or live in swing districts and get them to the polls. The app includes tools that help with messaging, outreach, and more!
HOW DOES OUTVOTE WORK?
Outvote is an app and a tool for campaigns that helps digital volunteers ask friends to get politically involved and vote. The app uses public voting data to show you which of your contacts lives in a critical district, as well as may have missed a previous election and could use an extra reminder to vote. For campaigns, Outvote gives the ability to create one-touch templates or scripts for their volunteers, provides crucial insight on how well a campaign is working and empowers supporters to mobilize their own networks for a specific candidate or cause. Outvote complements traditional outreach methods like canvassing, phone banking, and advertising. In our study of the Nevada primary, we found that people contacted via Outvote are 10% more likely to vote after getting a single message, a larger effect than any form of campaign outreach that comes from a stranger.
HOW CAN VOTE CAPTAINS USE OUTVOTE?
Outvote is the perfect tool to help Vote Captains manage their Team. The Outvote app provides Captains with GOTV and campaign messaging they can edit, suggests friends they may not have considered off the top of their head, and shows any contacts who live in swing districts. Additionally, individual users can choose to report data back about their conversations and Outvote can provide basic high-level reporting (messages sent, etc...) to help campaign admins measure the success of the campaign.
A lot of people want to get more politically involved and appreciate learning how from someone they trust. In addition to the power of your own vote, Outvote leverages the power of your authentic relationships to make sure all our voices are heard.
IS OUTVOTE PARTISAN?
Outvote only works with Democratic campaigns and progressive causes, but once we choose to work with an organization, they are in full control of their campaign messaging. Additionally, we created a free, nonpartisan app in partnership with Vote.org, so anyone can now encourage friends to vote without endorsing a particular candidate (the Vote.org app does not show you your friends public vote history or likely location).
WHO ARE ITS CREATORS AND WHAT INSPIRED IT’S CREATION?
Outvote was created by a group of friends who were all involved in politics in different ways (policy, activism, campaigns, research). We were all frustrated by the amount of money needed to run for office, fed up with outdated & ineffectual mobilization methods, and concerned by the proliferation of misinformation, Russian bots, Cambridge Analytica, and Trump. So we developed Outvote to return campaigning to authentic grassroots word-of-mouth - the way democracy is meant to work. Like any real change, we started at the local level and have grown to support campaigns across the country in partnership with national organizations like MoveOn and Swing Left.
IS IT FREE?
Campaigns pay a flat service fee to be listed on the platform and create their own messaging templates. Individuals can join any campaign and use Outvote for free!
