We Helped Students Launch a Voting App in 6 Weeks Reaching 10,000 Users
A Case Study in Civictech
The Global Shapers community is the World Economic Forum’s initiative to bring together leaders under 30 years of age. What sets this group apart from other young professional organizations is its focus on impact, specifically local impact.
So gather round and listen to a story of people and organizations coming together to make a difference.
The Challenger
Meet Michael. Michael was an Economics and Computational Neuroscience major from the bay area. From high school onward, he’d been interested in education and figuring out how technology can help. Studying at USC he was on track to be a management consultant and hadn’t been involved in any civic engagement initiatives.
The Futurethon popped up on my newsfeed and my friends and I decided to make a team. The Futurethon team had also been working on student outreach so some of my friends reached out to me as well. — Michael Lim
The Futurethon is an annual Global Shapers LA hosted hackathon focused on a different social issue each year, though it wasn’t the Shapers or their connection to the World Economic Forum that got him interested. He hadn’t heard of the Global Shapers or their connection to the Forum saying, “at the time we didn’t know the Global Shapers were behind it.”
While Michael did have a passion for education, he wasn’t interested in voter turnout before he signed up for Futurethon.
The Challenges
Global Shapers chose voter turnout as the issue to focus on during this year’s election. We wanted to address three challenges:
- Online Voter Registration
- Millennial Turnout
- Non-presidential Elections Engagement
Once given the Futurethon prompt to hack civic engagement and voter turnout, Michael began to learn more about the issue we were facing.
I was concerned about the single digit percentages in turnout among young people and the importance these small scale decisions could have.
Lucas, Michael’s teammate, had voted in the primaries and remembered it being a very confusing process. They wanted to simplify this process to get more information to the voter and to present that information in a more intuitive way.
The Pitch
They began with the intention to create a readable, informative printout of a sample California ballot. They pivoted into an even more feasible and user-friendly version. BallotView would be a web overlay of the ballot, accessible on your smartphone. Users could plug in their address and see all the different candidates and ballot initiatives that they would be voting on, in one easy place.
After a 48-hour competition between 60 people in 12 teams, Michael and the BallotView team were declared the winner.
But winning the prize was only the beginning, now they had to execute.
“Resource wise, we had no money,” said Michael, and so they were going to have to keep their costs low. “The majority of help we received was the advice and relationships that the Global Shapers provided.”
They had been working with Google to get data from their API but that more or less fell through. It took the connections of the Global Shapers to get the data they needed to populate the app. Suzy Jack, a Shaper at the Los Angeles Times, was able to use her connections with the City of Los Angeles to get the data.
The Struggle
They bit off more than they could chew, scope wise. They considered including a chat bot and started by off looking at the entire US. Soon it was clear they needed to scale back to the quality data from the City of LA.
They launched four days before the election and still didn’t have much traction. Michael stayed up all night sending emails to hundreds of reporters with no response. The Daily Trojan, USC’s student newspaper, wrote the sole article about the project.
The Assist
Global Shapers connected BallotView with Upworthy who syndicated their original video along with a story, while another mentor and Global Shapers connection, SeePolitical, donated $1,000 in Google Adwords.
Their efforts, combined with the connections of the Global Shapers, acquired 10k users for BallotView in time for the election.
As the team graduated and parted ways, Michael has learned that his voice matters and he has become more interested in broader education policy. Global Shapers, the Futurethon, and BallotView gave him an opportunity to get his hands dirty on an impact-focused, civic-oriented startup, connections that wouldn’t have been made without this initiative.
The Futurethon was spearheaded by LA Shapers Ian Donahue, Shelby Kretz, Christian Yang, and Prince Boucher and was supported by the rest of the Hub along with their partners Wondros, David Belasco and James Bottom from The Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, The USC Marshall School of Business, and Linda Lopez from the LA Mayors Office.
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