Progressive Firm Offers Cash Prize for New Turnout Tactics
As Democrats look for ways to revamp their voter engagement tactics, one progressive firm is offering a new incentive: cash.
Movement Labs, a tech-focused incubator and consulting firm, announced on Wednesday that it would launch a new initiative offering up to $500,000 in grants to organizations that come up with innovative approaches to increasing voter turnout in the 2025 elections in Virginia and New Jersey.
In a statement, the firm’s CEO Yoni Landau said that the initiative – dubbed the “Prove It Prize” – is “about creating the right incentives for groups to test bold ideas, measure their impact, and share what they learn.”
“We ran over 70 randomized controlled trials last cycle, and those results are directly shaping what we scale going forward,” Landau said. “Donors are rightfully frustrated when money is spent on tactics that don’t move votes – this prize helps the whole field focus on what’s proven to work.”
The program, which will be announced on Wednesday at a private retreat for progressive groups, will use randomized controlled studies to measure the real-world impact of each voter engagement or persuasion program. Participating groups will then share their randomly assigned treatments and control universe with a 3rd party auditor before Election Day.
The most effective program will receive a lump sum of up to $300,000 from the prize pool to help scale their work in the 2026 midterms. Other high-performing groups will split the remaining money, according to Movement Labs.
The successes – and failures – of each participant will then be shared across the broader progressive ecosystem in any effort to help other firms and organizations determine what works and doesn’t work.
A Broader Search for Solutions
The “Prove It Prize” is just one effort by Democratic and progressive strategists to retool the party’s voter engagement and outreach machinery in the wake of their 2024 defeats.
Other groups, like The Movement Cooperative, a nonprofit that provides tech and data support to progressive causes, began soliciting proposals for a new voter data system earlier this year. Meanwhile, the Democratic-aligned venture fund Higher Ground Labs launched a new nonprofit initiative called the Higher Ground Institute with the goal of easing tech adoption for campaigns and organizations.
“We are still running campaigns much too similar to the ones I started on,” Betsy Hoover, the founder and managing partner of Higher Ground Labs, told C&E in a recent interview. “So when I think about the future, I think that we’re at a moment right now where the Democratic Party as a whole is kind of waking up to this reality.”
“We have to do things differently, we have to rethink how this works, and from the HGL perspective, all of that has to be tech enabled,” she added.
