Filling the Progressive TikTok Gap

TikTok is a critical platform for connecting with young voters — how do we make sure progressives are reaching them? By Ben Resnik, Valeria Sosa Garnica, Oluwakemi Oso, and Kate Gage

Find the second in this series here: Filling the Progressive TikTok Gap: Results and Recommendations

Before 2021, Detroit Action had never run a TikTok ad campaign.

But by the end of the 2022 election cycle, their powerful, direct-to-camera video called I Grew Up Being Told attracted more than 300 new volunteer sign-ups in one of the first clear examples of TikTok supporting vote-tripling.

TikTok is a progressive powerhouse in waiting. It’s already home to incredibly powerful grassroots organizing and storytelling that has shifted political narratives. And yet, the left’s institutional investment in TikTok and other emerging platforms is almost nonexistent.

This year, Cooperative Impact Lab launched the Digital Innovation Fund as a step to closing that gap.

In partnership with Alliance for Youth Organizing, Way to Rise, Movement Voter Project, Propel Capital, Piece by Piece Strategies, Vocal Media, and Community Change, we invested in 13 organizations that, like Detroit Action, had diverse and innovative ideas to use TikTok for narrative change and to build progressive power.

Why TikTok and Why Now

For the past decade, online political messaging has rested on two pillars: micro-targeting and Facebook ads. In recent years, however, those pillars began to crack. Facebook ads have repeatedly proven ineffective as their price tag continues to balloon. Swayable, a Democratic message-testing firm, found that the core concept of micro-targeting, tailoring messages and messengers to specific voters, doesn’t work.

When every potential voter is buried under an avalanche of calls, texts, emails, and Facebook ads — all targeted in every way conceivable — there is no magic combination of plug-and-play messaging that can be exported between races to guarantee votes.

What does persuade? Telling a good story.

The same Swayable study found that pairing a straightforward call to action with a clear narrative was more important than matching age, race, gender, income, or issue area. In other words, persuasion isn’t just about finding the right messenger or words: it’s about connecting with audiences in the right way.

Enter Tiktok, where Gen Z and K-Pop fans spontaneously transform into grassroots organizers, and a self-organized progressive community earns millions of views every month.

Progressives on TikTok wield persuasive power, but it doesn’t come from imported headlines from progressive talking points. Jess Salinas from New Media Ventures and DIF senior advisor Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman sum it up nicely:

“Although platforms like TikTok … have home-grown progressive influencers, the institutional left is almost entirely disconnected from them.”

While campaigns use the same talking points we’ve heard for years, grassroots progressive content creators draw up their personal experiences and shared culture to connect with their audience authentically. They put the narrative first, trusting their audience has the attention span and intelligence to understand.

TikTok isn’t just a video-based social network — it’s the storytelling app for this moment.

The short-form video medium, whether on TikTok or another emerging platform, is here to stay. Home-grown progressive content creators are constantly innovating to stir audiences to action. And their approach seems to work.

RunAAPI’s partner content with influencer @amosonline

How We Designed the Digital Innovation Fund

Cooperative Impact Lab launched DIF to grow the progressive community’s understanding of TikTok as a medium for digital advocacy, narrative work, and political change. We took aim at what we saw as the most urgent problem in the digital organizing space. While there are great efforts by groups like Accelerate Change and the Better Internet Initiative, there is little knowledge and best practices for organizations to act on what good, progressive content looks like for short-form videos on platforms like TikTok.

By prioritizing projects by those native to the platform (especially young people and people of color), we hoped to identify strategies and insights that organizations and individuals can implement across the movement.

This work centers on four critical questions necessary to build a robust progressive strategy on TikTok:

1. What features do the best-performing progressive TikTok videos have in common?
2. Is geographically specific TikTok content possible to source, and will it reach the right audience?
3. Which performs better, content created and posted in-house or content created and posted by microinfluencers?
4. What is the average cost of a single piece of TikTok content in dollars and staff time?

From a pool of over 50 remarkable applicants, we chose 13 organizations that proposed nonpartisan TikTok programs ahead of the 2022 Elections:

• 1Hood Media Academy
• Advance Native Political Leadership Education Fund
• Chicago Votes
• Detroit Action Education Fund, a project of Tides Center
• Forward Montana/Forward Montana Foundation
• Loud Light
• The Washington Bus Education Fund
• National Black Worker Center
• New Georgia Project
• Noticias Para Inmigrantes, a project of Accelerate Change
• RUN AAPI
• Houston in Action
• Youth Rise Texas

You can read more about the grantees and their projects on the CIL website.

Their projects represent a cross-section of thoughtful, creative, and ambitious projects with diverse tactics and focus areas. More than anything, they represent diverse talent with the creative vision and social media expertise to authentically connect with their communities and meet voters where they are. We asked these organizations to discover best practices from which the entire movement could learn, mainly by trial and error. But they didn’t go it alone:

• Luminaries in the progressive TikTok space, including Madeline V. Twomey of Rufus andMane and Shannon Cooke-Vigliano of Vocal Media, joined our training webinars to provide an inside look at cutting-edge TikTok content strategy.
• Our partners, Vocal Media and Community Change, offered coaching and expert guidance (shout out to Mikka Kei MacDonald from Community Change!).
• We created a community for grantees to share wins, compare notes, and learn from each other.

By Election Day, DIF TikTok content had appeared in the feeds of hundreds of thousands of users, spreading critical voting information, countering Spanish-language disinformation, and feeding online engagers into real-world volunteer pipelines.

Initial Takeaways

No one knows best practices. Ten of our 13 grantees, including TikTok veterans with thousands of followers, cited access to best practices on creator recruitment, content production, or metrics for political programs as the most significant area where they needed support. The fact that even grantees with a significant following feel cut off from basic knowledge about leveraging TikTok is a canary in the coal mine for everyone else.

High-volume content recruitment is the great white whale. Many groups exploring microinfluencer partnerships ran into the same wall. Many microinfluencers, flooded with partnership requests during this cycle, didn’t reply to outreach, and most of those that did, required at least one follow-up. This highlights the importance of creator relationships on TikTok: You can’t just factory-farm this content. Many grantees leaned into the challenge and cultivated these relationships as a part of their strategy. One grantee invited their microinfluencers to attend in-person events, moving them up the ladder of engagement like any volunteer. Others used their existing membership as the core source of their content. Shout out to orgs like Vocal Media and Better Internet Initiative who are working on cultivating these relationships.

The magic word is “lightweight.” TikTok requires a steady drumbeat of content. Whether it was being produced in-house or through partnerships with microinfluencers, many grantees were limited by the time they had to devote to content production. This is a challenge, but it’s a hopeful sign, too: There are ways to build smart, lightweight TikTok strategies into even resource-limited programs. Many movement organizations can grow their narrative footprint by working smarter.

Defining the Best Content

They’re short. Virtually all the top-performing TikTok content lasted under a minute; one of the top-performing posts by views clocked in at four seconds:

TikTok by @loud_light

They riff off of culture and are entertaining. The TikTok above could afford to be short because it leveraged a common TikTok “sound” that instantly told viewers what to expect. Some of DIF’s most compelling content used the same approach, letting popular sounds carry most of the context for the video. A few other strong examples:

• RUN AAPI worked with a popular microinfluencer to leverage beauty trends into a short, punchy, and visually compelling reminder to vote.
• Noticias Para Inmigrantes used a sound popular in the Latinx community to create social pressure to vote.
• The National Black Worker Center used astrology memes to make Election Day voting familiar and accessible.

Spanish Language TikTok from Noticias Para Inmigrantes

They’re of, for, and by the community. Two top-performing TikToks broke some of these rules: They were longer, less focused, and less story-driven. But they compensated by letting their communities do the talking: 1Hood created a video that earned almost 100 times as many viewers as their account had followers with the simple question, “What do you feel about people saying that Gen Z doesn’t vote?” DIF’s most viral post of the cycle, earning the National Black Worker Center 159,000 views across organic and boosted reach, simply asked high school students who they would vote for if they could vote for anyone. Viewers picked up the thread in the comments, effortlessly combining the pro-voting message with other memes.

Longer-form TikTok from 1Hood Media

Where We Go From Here

In the next few weeks, we will dive deeper into the metrics to answer our research questions and create a comprehensive report to share with movement leaders and organizations. And in January 2023, Cooperative Impact Lab will present our findings and case studies to the broader progressive community.

In an election cycle as full of short-term emergencies as this one, it would have been easy to overlook long-term narrative change work. We are eternally grateful to the funders, partners, and staff who share our vision of the future of digital organizing and invested in the Digital Innovation Fund.

If we have one final takeaway, it’s that this work is just beginning. As we move toward 2024, we cannot afford to ignore the power of emerging platforms in shaping the minds and beliefs of the rising generation of voters. It will take nothing less than a realignment of progressive priorities and investment in digital experimentation and innovation. The result won’t just be more, or even better, content but a shift in how we communicate and connect, amplifying narratives and stories that are persuasive, authentic, and human.

Thank you to all our supporters, and especially Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman for her leadership and guidance in this program

Please contact us here for more information about the Digital Innovation Fund or to stay in the loop for updates.

CIL ran a similar program in 2020 to incentivize digital experimentation- you can read the results from that project here:

The 2020 Digital Innovation Fund