Our Mission

We will foster a deeper and wider understanding of the context of civic participation at the local level, to enable the full participation of citizens in our democracy.

About half the voting age population in the United States doesn’t vote. About a third of voting age citizens aren’t registered to vote.

You’ve heard this before. You take it for granted. You probably even think that at, some basic level, you know why those people aren’t registered and don’t vote.

If you’re like most Americans, you tend to sort them into one of two categories: those who don’t care and those who are the subjects of voter suppression and intimidation.

Since by this time the franchise is theoretically available to almost all American adults— men and women, rich and poor, young and old, people of all races, ethnicities, religions and national origins, 18 and over, a citizen — you might think that the relative steadiness of voter turnout over time just reflects a persistent segmenting of the electorate into the half who care and the half who don’t, the half who will fight to overcome obstacles to voting, and the half who won’t.

But we also know that since the last great expansion of the franchise — to those over 18 in 1971 — a steady progression of policies enacted mainly at the state level have worked to steadily shrink the percentage of the voting age population that is eligible to vote — through residency requirements, ID requirements, and state laws preventing former felons from voting. Around the edges, state elections officials play with voter roll purges, moving or eliminating polling places, changing registration dates and so on. And meanwhile, candidates, campaigns and PACs engage in soft vote suppression — crafting messages that discourage groups of people from voting because they are intimidated, afraid, confused, disgusted, or exhausted.

There are political advantages to preventing groups of people from registering, voting and running for office. Parties get to maintain power if only “their” voters actually vote. People who have been in office for years get to stay in office not solely through the symbolic power of incumbency, but the real power — the ability to wield more influence, raise more money and even change the rules of the game itself.

We know that voting is hard — and we know that it always has been.

At the heart of our Madisonian democracy is a desire that our systems slow down, and also a persistent debate about who should participate in civic life.

These obstacles, this partisan gamesmanship, this discrimination and these debates are embedded in the American system. There are organizations hard at work changing some of the rules of the game to undo them, through automatic registration, same-day registration, early voting, absentee voting and other legislation. There are many others working to help people navigate these purposefully perilous civic waters, working to turn citizens into registered voters, to turn those voters out, to encourage frequent voters to campaign and volunteer, to turn campaigners and volunteers into candidates.

Resources have poured in — though they seem to never be enough — to efforts aimed at better civic design and better civic technology, improving the (mainly digital) interface between voters, parties and the government.

And so, at the intersection of these forces — forces doing what they can to suppress voting, and forces doing what they can to ease the process of registration and voting —there are many people who simply do not vote.

Despite the considerable effort and investment of all these organizations, despite the dominant stories about legislative and strategic voter suppression, we find that there is still remarkably little known about non-voters. And while we know quite a bit about the obstacles that lay in the path of those who want to register as voters and then vote, we don’t know much about “step zero” — the conditions and context that transform someone from a citizen to a person who want to be a voter.

But we believe that a democratic society should aim for full participation of its citizens and design civic systems to ensure full participation.

People who don’t vote (or didn’t vote for the winner) are nevertheless citizens & constituents. They are entitled to representation by candidates and elected officials.

People have many ways to participate in civic life, advocate for their families and communities, and gain access to the democratic process. Everyday participation is often local and intimate, below the radar of national groups. Too often, this effort is discounted as less important than voting, when it could hold the key to understanding why some people are voters and some aren’t.

As researchers and strategists, we know people are complex and live in complicated systems. It’s time to embrace that complexity and design for those systems.

By focusing solely on voting, registration and turnout — we miss the full fabric and context of civic participation, and therefore, miss opportunities to meet people where they truly are.

We know how hard it can be to get registered to vote in many jurisdictions. We know how hard it can be to then actually cast a vote. But we don’t know much at all about the period before those two points, about the period between those two points, and the period after them. Registration and voting are important touch points and need a lot of work — there are plenty of very smart people doing that work and we support and learn from them. But we want to understand the parts of the process of becoming and remaining a voter that are harder to study.

Developing a working model of what keeps people out of (or what brings people into) the formal electoral process will help us and our partners create content, tools, services, and programs that tackle the root causes of “non-voting”, while honoring the other ways people participate in civic life.

We’re not flying blind — we have some theories

We’ve spent the past six months studying the work of others endeavoring to understand what drives voters and what does not. We’ve discovered that most of the work deals with demographics and behavior within the voter ‘funnel’ (from registration onward).

But we’ve also spent time studying communities that get a lot of attention by national political campaigns because they are in swing states, heavily gerrymandered districts, or represent voters that are either the core to a campaign’s coalition or need to be brought into the fold to prevail on Election Day.

We’ve concluded, in a way that is absolutely unsurprising, that all politics is local. But in talking to independent voters across Pennsylvania this spring, we realized something else — it’s not just about the pot holes, it’s about the systems people experience at the local level. Pot holes are symbolic of a government that is not doing its job for people. They can literally see and feel the government not working for them.

As we dug deeper into the histories, cultures, and systems of these communities, we began to develop a working model that will guide our work. We identified three factors that influence people’s attitudes towards and experience of civic participation:

Our job is to investigate these factors, and to understand how they shape civic participation and voting behavior patterns. Our thesis is that these factors will be present in almost every American town — but the color and texture will be different. By developing this model further, we believe we can help organizations better understand communities and the nature of civic participation — to amplify and enable important work they do in their communities and to enable and encourage more people in those communities to become voters.

Research as Activism

“Fight for the people you’re making ethnographies about.”
— Ian Schafer, former CEO of DeepFocus

As consumer and design researchers, ethnographers, product strategists, and brand strategists, we have long been advocates for people as consumers and customers. We work to reduce friction and increase affinity or engagement, to be sure, but also to create value for people in places where value extraction is the norm.

Simply put, we want the users, customers or constituents of a system to be able to succeed at using that system.

In the case of civic participation, people deserve a heightened form of advocacy — they don’t need Powerpoint presentations delivered in conference rooms hundred of miles from their home, they deserve activism, with and from people who will take the time to honor and understand their communities, and support their fight for greater access to the electoral process and greater responsiveness from their elected officials, no matter their voter status.

As part of this effort, we’re undertaking a project we call First Person Projects. This project has three short-term goals.

Goal #1

We intend to create a model for understanding civic participation that helps community organizers, non-profits, corporate CSR programs, local governments and other interested parties identify opportunities for increasing participation.

Goal #2

Our intention is to be radically transparent about our methods and progress — as well as to collaborate with our local partners to validate our findings and ensure we are doing justice to these communities’ experiences. We will share what we learn through blog posts, placed articles, podcasts, white papers, infographics, slideshow presentations, raw data, and events.

Goal #3

Building on what we learn and the feedback we get, we will develop — and co-develop with partners — tools for activating participation, especially voting. We want to build the pipeline of voters, volunteers and community activists that the many organizations working to “level up” voters need.

We believe this is a business.

We’re not — at least for now — forming this as a non-profit corporation. We believe we can be of service to non-profits, academic institutions, and local governments. But we also believe that we are entering an era in which brands and businesses that do not take seriously their role as members of a democratic society will lose relevance with their own constituents — both their employees and their customers.

Questions? Want to get involved? Email us.