New Florida Majority’s experiments with gamified influencer marketing to turn out Latina voters

Written by Marium Navid on behalf of the Cooperative Impact Lab

Special thank you to New Florida Majority, The Luz Collective, The Cooperative Impact Lab, The Movement Cooperative, The Resilient Democracy Fund, and Way To Win.

The Problem

With the pandemic, New Florida Majority (NewFM) faced the problem of having to re imagine in person events and programming to be effective digitally. They also wanted to find ways to use digital to reach more of one their targeted audiences: young Latinas. Latinas are also a demographic that is overlooked year after year in election work. Through the Digital Innovation Fund, NewFM received a $60,000 grant, as well as data support and coaching to support their influencer marketing experiments.

Key Questions

• How can we optimize the voter engagement user experience to increase relational organizing?
• Can we use influencers to increase voter material reach and get more young Latinas politically engaged?

The Learnings

Top Takeaways: Trust your intuition around knowing your community when building out new messaging and engagement streams. Incentives for voter engagement through a gamification user flow worked better than general GOTV outreach, but also needs a lot more time to build (start early!)

The influencer ads produced over 120,000 impressions with a 2.82% engagement rate

The paid promotion campaign produced over 124.8k impressions, with a reach of 67.7k and an engagement rate of 3.86%.

By Election Day, 1,347 pledges and unique emails were collected (394 of those from Florida)

Gamifying the Voter Engagement Experience

New Florida Majority set up a pledge to vote campaign that was gamified where the more people someone pledged to vote, the more swag they earned. They built a website where people could create their own unique URL’s to collect pledges, put together the process for awarding swag, launched ads to promote the campaign, and worked with influencers to expand organic young Latina reach.

It took about a month for the team to fully utilize Facebook ads because of the strict political ad restrictions. During this month they also worked to optimize the user experience on the website by making it clear the participants did not have to pay for the swag and that there was not a limit on how many people could win items. They also took out a lot of copy on the web page. After testing out the user experience more they also updated the page to reflect Latinos en Marcha branded merchandise to help support the message of collective Latina voting power.

By the next month, NewFM was beginning to utilize influencers and started marketing the campaign on other platforms because of the low conversion rates on Facebook. They noticed Tik Tok influencer content was picking up more traction than Instagram. In comparison, Tik Tok activation resulted in double the amount of pledges than Instagram, all coming from Florida.

Another marketing tactic they used was direct outreach to over 45 Florida-based organizations. They focused on organizations that served Latina populations such as multicultural greek letter organizations. These organizations all had a focus on empowering young women and community involvement.

Overall, NewFM needed more time to better optimize the user experience from website to referral and make the process clear and seamless for users. The gamification element had higher conversions. When looking at ads that promoted voter engagement vs the pledge, more people were sharing the pledge at a faster rate.

NewFM plans to use the gamification tactics in upcoming campaigns such as the gubernatorial race and wants to expand testing to other demographics such as young Black men, Haitian communities, and other Latina groups. Based off of the 2020 election work, investment year round will be needed to be trusted messengers when the next election comes around.

Influencer Marketing

NewFM brought in influencers because they noticed their conversion rates were low and they also had limited ad capacity on Facebook because of political ad restrictions. They found that the use of influencers is effective in some cases but not in all cases. Some influencers were more effective than ads and some were less effective. Overall NewFM found Tik Tok influencers had higher conversions than Instagram influencers

Engagement and comments on the influencer marketing posts and paid promotion ads reflected the excitement of voting. Comments included messaging of empowerment and voting for progressive leaders as well as messaging on Latina pride and power. This engagement affirmed the need to step away from mainstream mentality and shift into spaces they embrace and enjoy themselves. Once you see people respond like this, it’s a validation of knowing your community.