Highly Advisable

I have the good fortune of having a very smart thesis advisor in the form of my good friend Richard from R/GA. We sat down last week to discuss my thesis POLLY, a civics education app for high school “pre-voters” so that they are more prepared, engaged, empowered, willing to vote when the time comes.

I will just list some of the advice I received and what we discussed:

• Keep the info to short byte-sized chunks…short, snack-sized sprints.
• Everyone is inundated with information. You don’t want people to go home after school or work and feel like they need to do more work.
• Info needs to be easy to process.
• Have you seen SALT FAT ACID HEAT or Marie Kondo on Netflix? You watch those and you are learning but it doesn’t feel that way.
• Social media only tells one side of the story.
• Have a balance and tell both sides of the issues.
• They’re better for it if they know both sides.

We talked about how to sell POLLY, how to pitch it. Something like:

I’ve seen a lot of campaigns and apps aimed to increase voter turnout amongst the youth. A lot of services exist. They are trying to push, guilt people to vote rather than giving them a real education or valid knowledge on why voting matters. POLLY circumvents this problem by getting at the root of the problem. So that when election day comes they are fully empowered to actually vote. A lack of civic education which is the central argument of my thesis.

This reminds me a of a quote from a high school civics teacher I interviewed in early January 2019 which really re-energized me because it was exactly what I am trying to do:

“It seems like you are focusing more on policies more than politics which I think is great because a lot of the civics organizations now are saying stop focusing so much on election day and voting itself. Focus more on policies and the issues.”

-Thomas Naughton (high school social studies teacher)

My advisor suggested creating a “spine” for the app concept. So I created the journey/service map below comparing the experience of a typical young voter with and without POLLY. It’s a customer journey from when they are introduced to politics to when they can affect it. It’s idealistic, but hopefully by the end of this journey I will have really figured out how POLLY can alleviate the pain points effectively.

Some more advice:

• Have a POV of why certain features exist and why.
• I need to have a slide that speaks to the brand, that conveys the emotional feeling.
• Check articles on Skillshare, Code Academy to see how people learn.
• Is there an experience that extends through e-mails, push notifications?
• Look at apps targeted at Gen Z.
• Check Giide, shine.us, Strava, Pocket app (this app definitely has a great feature that allows the user to save and listen to an audio version of articles. Students I interviewed also thought an audio component was important)
• Anything I can do to make the experience of learning user is key.
• Copy is important, how the questions are formed, the language for young people (shine.us)
• What gamification techniques can I utilize? badges, points, is there a ‘King of the Hill’?
• Does winner get set up to actually meet with a Congressperson on the issues they care about?
• Can POLLY be leveraged to set up a petition on user’s behalf?
• Read Nier Eyal’s ‘Hooked”
• Let user leave messages on issues that community can read.
• Show, for instance, that Richard has checked out an article on this…
• Allow user to recommend new issues.
• Most people don’t know anything about bills. They are fairly dry and boring. Does POLLY surface 4 of the most relevant and break them down in understandable language?
• Look at bots that can be your character. POLLY can be that bot, like Emma for Vail, Rose for the Cosmopolitan, Erica for Bank of America

All of this is great advice as I keep honing my product. Every week brings new challenges and new solutions.