A group behind a successful letter-writing campaign that it said helped increase turnout in 2020 is expanding its effort for the midterm cycle.
Last presidential cycle, Vote Forward organized 200,000 volunteers to write 17.6 million letters to voters in 21 states. The group, which operates both as a 501(c)(4), where its able to do some partisan work, and 501(c)(3), found that hand-written letters can actually increase turnout by close to 1 percentage point — a conclusion that was supported by the Analyst Institute. They’re now looking to reach 10 million voters with letters encouraging them to cast a ballot in advance of the midterms.
Scott Forman, founder and executive director of Vote Forward, said his group has improved its software and built out a partner coalition that includes a host of progressive and civic groups to help in the 2022 effort. He’s also prepared for the high level of volunteer engagement that he’s found comes with this campaign, called The Big Send.
“This year, we’re more ready for it. We know that it’s possible, but it’s still very heartening and it’s the reason why we’re doing this again,” he told C&E. “We are seeing a lot of energy and enthusiasm to participate in this already this year.” Ahead of a publicity push around the effort in mid May, the ground already had 11,000 volunteers who have adopted a voter to write a letter to this cycle.
One of the biggest challenges is screening the volunteers to ensure that their “heart is in the right place,” according to Forman.
“We’ve been very careful to make sure the volunteers are civil and thoughtful and abide by a set of constraints to make sure that what they’re writing is something that they should be proud to stand behind,” he said. “We do ask them to tell us what they’re going to write on every letter.”
The letter template that the volunteers get is non-partisan, and simply encourages participation rather than supporting a specific candidate. The cost of printing the letter and postage is borne by the volunteer. Vote Forward picks the targets. The group’s software is also designed to ensure that the volunteers follow through on their commitment. (Other than organizing large letter-writing parties on Mobilize, the group relies entirely on its own software for the campaign.)
“It’s a little bit more complicated than it might appear on the surface,” he said. “It takes some careful user-experience design and some careful software engineering.”
Forman noted the program is also popular with the group’s major donors.
“It’s not that unusual for us to have pretty significant donors who are also volunteers, which I think is a little bit rare in this world,” he said. “And it speaks to the fact that they really do believe that it works and they enjoy doing it, just like all of our other volunteers.”
The pairing of a tech platform with a in-real-life (IRL) outcome is something that could become the standard for organizing going forward, according to David Berrios, head of community for Swing Left.
Berrios calls the letter writing campaign a “hybrid organizing approach.”
“Postcarding has been around forever. Direct mail has been around since the 1970s. This is an innovative approach when it comes to finding different ways to touch these voters that adds a little bit more of a personal touch and is just as high impact,” he recently told C&E.
Berrios’s group, Swing Left, is one of the organizations that has, for the midterms, partnered with Vote Forward, albeit to send non-partisan, voting encouragement letters.
“It shows where campaigns are going right now,” said Berrios. “Coming out of the pandemic, Democratic campaigns, institutions, Swing Left, doubled down on making sure that we lowered the barrier to entry as [much as] possible for folks to contact other voters.”
He added: “I would not write off writing letters moving forward for [campaigns] across the board. We’ve seen how effective it is.”
