I’m Registering Young Voters on Facebook and So Can You.
Some of you may have read my other writing about how I’ve been using Facebook for issues-based political advertising. I have good news — it works for voter registration! Even better news? The results indicate it doesn’t help Republicans at all.
How It All Started
In the last few months since I published my first piece on Facebook activism I’ve had the privilege of working with some great progressive groups to design and implement digital ad strategies. One was the Amendment 4 campaign in Florida, a measure that local activists worked hard to get on the ballot in November. They enlisted my help to keep the issue fresh in the minds of Florida voters, and Facebook was one of the tools we’d been using. The question came up: Could we use Facebook to register new voters around the issue of voting rights? I decided to find out.
Florida is one of the growing number of states offering online voter registration. Registering and turning out young and economically disadvantaged voters has been a “white whale” in progressive politics for decades. Both groups vote heavily Democratic, but they barely vote. Watching the success of the Parkland survivors gave me some hope. Perhaps we could get young people to register and stay engaged, if we framed it properly.
The Call to Action
It’s a term used heavily in digital advertising. The “call to action” gets someone’s attention and makes them — in this case — click an ad. Young people are the Internet’s most discerning consumers. They’ve grown up online, and they can sniff out bullshit in ads. I had my work cut out for me.
My first tests were inspired by someone from Twitter, a fellow marketer who was working on a voter registration campaign. He was using inspirational ad images and positive messaging. Young women, striking powerful poses. I liked the concept.
Initial testing was promising. Young people were clicking. What I needed now was to figure out how many of them were unregistered. Sending them directly to the State of Florida’s website didn’t give the full picture, since I couldn’t track it.
I created a simple landing page (ad-speak for “the page you end up on when you click something”) with two options. Are you Registered? Yes or No. Of the young people visiting my page, around 15% of them were selecting one of my two options. This may seem like a small number, but it’s pretty good for digital marketing. Many people who click on ads do so mistakenly and “bounce” or leave the page immediately. No landing page is going to appeal to everyone.
Among people who clicked on either of the two options, a little more than half identified themselves as unregistered. I sent them directly to the Florida state voter registration page. Those who identified as registered I sent to a different page on the state’s website, so they could confirm and update their voter registration. This would keep the idea of voting fresh in their minds, and make them more likely to pull the lever when the time came.
Time to Optimize!
I’m never happy with my ads. Chances are, they could be better in some way. Initial results were promising, but my “relevance score” was low. This meant my message was not resonating, which is what I’d worried would happen. Young voters are a tough nut to crack. I had a large audience, but I wasn’t convincing enough of them to click. I needed a better call to action.
After the Parkland shooting, I’d done some advertising in Florida to encourage the Governor to sign a gun control bill coming out of the legislature. I decided to give some of those images a try, with the hope that what had pissed off Floridians once would piss them off again.
I was right! My new ads were performing two times better than Flexing Girl. My click costs were suddenly very reasonable. In Florida, at least, the motivator for young people to register to vote was reminding them how shitty their current leadership was.
How Many People Was I Actually Registering?
Now that I had reduced my advertising costs to an acceptable level and found ads that resonated with my young audience, I needed to determine how many people were actually registering. I couldn’t get any feedback from the state of Florida, since I had no way to match my ad-clickers to new voter registrations. I needed to do SCIENCE.
I created a form and ran some advertisements, sending people to my own page instead of Florida’s registration site. People provided me with basic information which would allow me to verify their registration status with the state. This gave me two key bits of information — how many people who clicked on one of my links took action and how many of them were actually unregistered. I’d done Science and solved two of my problems.
I confirmed that around half of them were unregistered, which matched the data from my previous tests. Around 21% of people who clicked on one of my new ads took further action, giving me my key metric for new registrations.
The Whale Appears
15% of people who saw my page clicked an option. 50% of those people were unregistered. 21% of the unregistered people likely took action and registered to vote.
This may look like a high school algebra question, but it’s key for advertisers like myself to determine our “cost per result” for a campaign of this nature. I could now provide people who funded my efforts with concrete data to show them how far their dollars would go.
Every state is not Florida, but I have a high level of confidence that these numbers are going to persist across any state with online voter registration.
Digging in the Data
As I started to get results from people who’d provided their info for voter verification, another positive trend emerged. The 50% of people who were already registered between the ages of 18 and 27 were nearly all Democrats. In a sample of 100 registered voters, only one person was registered as a Republican.
My potential audience was 1.6 million, and I’d only scratched the surface with my testing. There are a lot more young Democrats out there. I plan on reaching as many as I can before November.
So, What’s Next?
My first essay on my political advertising struck a chord, and gave me the opportunity to work with great people and organizations moving the causes of social justice and activism forward. I’m hoping this piece helps raise awareness on the left that it’s possible to reach young voters and get them involved in the process, if we can find a message that resonates with them.
If you work in political advertising, marketing, activism, or a related field, I’m happy to share my ideas with you. Hit me up and let’s talk.
My email is here. You can read other things I’ve written on Medium. I’ve also got a Facebook Group for Political Organizing and Activism.