Flip Elections Fast: Meet Outvote
Written by Rachel Lourie.
There’s no denying that campaign organizing will always be about human interaction — but how can we use technology to scale meaningful interactions? One answer lies in Outvote, a platform that allows volunteers to take actions that they’re comfortable with, on behalf of the candidates and organizations they care about, as a way to move the needle.
Keep reading to find out what we learned from Outvote’s founder, Naseem Makiya, on how they’re changing the organizing game.
A Description of Outvote
“Outvote is an app for organizing. Anyone, anywhere can download our app and volunteer to make a difference for a candidate or an organization or a cause that they care about. Our platform connects volunteers to everything from presidential campaigns to local municipal races, and advocacy organizations that vary in size. You can do everything from send messages to friends inviting them to take action, to canvassing, to signing up for volunteer shifts on the app — all of the things that can be super valuable for a campaign. There are two ways to interact within the app. The first is via a specific campaign that you sign up to volunteer for, and you get connected to that campaign and learn how you can help with that particular effort. The other is that you simply hear about Outvote and self-select what you’d like to get involved in. Either way, you can curate your experience in order to engage in what you’re passionate about and choose specifically how you’d like participate.
We’re trying to synchronize everything you can do to elect a candidate or support a cause. In the midterms, our most compelling use case was that people could download the app, and we’d tell them which of their phone contacts were in swing districts so that users could multiply their voting impact by intentionally reaching out to those specific people.
We don’t expect people to text their friends once a month — the best time to reach out is when there’s a lot of urgency — so we’re working on how to keep people engaged and up-to-date over time. We want to make campaign interactions less transactional and have Outvote be a place where there’s always a way to engage.”
The Idea Behind Outvote
“Outvote was built from the ground up. I’d done the startup thing in Silicon Valley for a few years and came back to Boston to work for another startup. In 2016, I got swept up in the elections and felt like there was a gap in the technology products and services that were available for campaigns. I left my job and started volunteering for various local campaigns, on a ballot initiative, with local city council candidates, and with advocacy groups. All the while, I was asking myself “what can we build that would actually be useful?”. We didn’t want to build something that already existed or that would be terribly difficult to implement.
What I found was that what seemed to work in activating people was face-to-face or human-to-human interaction. When you get someone at the door canvassing and can chat for 5 minutes, it’s super impactful, but actually getting someone to answer the door is the challenge. Scaling that to maximize impact is difficult. The whole point of technology is to scale what works or make something more accessible and convenient — and so we wanted to determine how we could bring that to politically-oriented interactions. We started making the connection that everyone cares what their friends think, and everyone has their phone on them all the time with hundreds of contacts, and most of those contacts are people they’d be comfortable reaching out to. So, let’s build a way to streamline those interactions. For example — if you have 500 people in your contact list, and all of those are people you can have real human-to-human interactions with, we’ll give you the information you need to reach out and move the needle. Scaling those interactions — that’s how you flip an election.
There’s this weird phenomenon that everyone thinks their friends vote, but since only 40% of Americans vote in midterms, there’s no way that’s the case. As result, our original idea was to show people who they knew that didn’t vote in the last election. We piloted it in Cambridge and Somerville to see what it looked like in practice at the local level in 2017. Once we did that and saw success, we wanted to blow it out in the midterms. We worked with an incubator in Silicon Valley to polish up the product, and, in 2018, we partnered with some of the biggest forces in democratic politics like Swing Left, MoveOn, and Beto O’Rourke’s campaign. Now that the cycle is over, we have a chance to step back and determine how we scale our GOTV product into a year-round organizing force, and that’s what we’re tackling now.”
What Users Get
“For volunteers, we’ve gamified the process a bit. Users get insight into their personal networks — who votes, who lives in swing districts, who’s missed elections, and more. We try to tell them everything that’s publicly available in the voter files. You used to have to be a campaign insider to get that type of information, and we’ve democratized that in some ways. We like to gamify the actions people can take so that they stay engaged.
From the campaign customer side, we focus on and give them what they care about, which are engagement metrics. How many people are downloading the app? Sending messages? Bringing new voters into the universe that the campaign didn’t already know? Activating voters who weren’t engaged? Driving social share, donations, and shift sign ups? There’s a dashboard where campaigns can see all of that data, which is enormously valuable.”
Why Outvote Is Unique
“There are a lot of great ways to do the work that we’re enabling — and lots of companies are building great campaign and organizing tech. What we’re trying to do is wrap up as much of what works as possible and build one place where everything is streamlined. It should be super easy to take action, and we want to make it as easy as possible for people to get involved in the ways that are comfortable for them. We provide a lot of options that are convenient and easy to access. In the future, that will mean integrating with a number of other great tools — we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We have two main goals. We want it to be easy for anyone, anywhere to engage (or get involved) with things they care about. And we want to bring some serious engineering power to campaigns and organizations who otherwise might not be able to build something like this.
How Naseem Got Into Tech and Politics
“It’s funny, because I realized that you don’t have to be a political insider to get involved (to affect change in politics). A lot of people are itching to get involved but don’t know how to plug in. I didn’t know either — I’m just a normal guy. I worked in Silicon Valley for a few years building websites. I had opinions in politics but wasn’t an activist or organizer, so when I went back to Boston, I worked for an education tech company because I wanted to apply my tech experience to something that would make an impact. Serendipitously, 2016 was a crazy political atmosphere and felt like a good time to get involved. So I realized that you can just go for it — you don’t have to be an insider, and we just started talking to people and learning how organizing worked on a day-in, day-out basis. We got involved the same way you’d start in anything!
Campaigns are desperate for people who are passionate, and everyone brings a unique talent to the table. The political space in general is behind on engineering power. We’re trying to help fill that gap. One thing we saw that stood out as we were learning about how this whole space worked is that the only campaigns who weren’t desperate for engineering talent were presidential campaigns. They’re the ones that built all of this tech, but at the end of the cycle they go back to their regular jobs and the tech gets “shelved.” Instead of shelving and rebuilding every four years, we want to build something great once, keep up the momentum, and license it out at a rate that’s affordable down the entire ballot.”
How Tech Is Shaping Politics
“There are a few things that are really influential in terms of how tech is shaping politics. What we’re building is hopefully having a positive impact — friends talking to each other and allowing anyone to engage. But there’s a lot out there that’s having a negative impact, especially with misinformation campaigns. Not only “fake” news — but in some ways social media has created echo chambers of siloed news where you aren’t going to get other opinions because of the way social media feeds are organized. This drives people to take sides, and the divide gets perpetuated. And that’s super worrying; if we’re all operating in our own silos, there’s no way to check the false narratives and extreme positioning that gets recycled. Another thing we’re seeing are ads that are really micro-targeted, and a lot of money being spent to influence people; the age of blanket or broadcast ads is gone. Everything now is super targeted, which is good in some ways but also leads to candidates and organizations sending a message that they know is going to work rather than raising awareness about a platform. Social media trolling is also super powerful — it’s hard to know if there’s a real person behind that comment, share, or like. Whether bots or fake accounts, there’s fake engagement, and that changes someone’s minds about something. If you see thousands of people engaging in something but you don’t know it’s fake, you’re going to be more likely to engage, which is problematic. So, while tech can impact politics in positive ways, there are definitely negative aspects too, and it’ll be interesting to see how that continues to play out.”
At Agency Advisors, we bring new and innovative tech to candidates, causes, and the agencies that work on their behalf. This series aims to shed light on the leading-edge technologies that are creating a resounding impact within politics and advocacy.
