Rising Voices Of Asian American Families experiments with in-language digital organizing to get out the vote

Written by Marium Navid on behalf of the Cooperative Impact Lab

Special thank you to Rising Voices of Asian American Families, The Cooperative Impact Lab, The Movement Cooperative, The Resilient Democracy Fund, and Way To Win.

The Problem

In 2019 Rising Voices of Asian American Families saw the need to build out organizing capacity for APIA in Michigan. They also knew AAPI communities were often overlooked by national campaigns with little attention given around the language divide between these campaigns and mainstream electoral messaging. Through the Digital Innovation Fund, Rising Voices of Asian American Families received a $55,000 grant, and digital strategy coaching to support their digital organizing experiments.

Key Questions

• Does translating GOTV materials to other languages increase turn out rates?
• How much in language work is required to make an impact in engaging with AAPI communities?

The Learnings

Top Takeaways: Having staff and volunteers who speak the language of the constituents helps to increase the value of engagement during phone banks and text banks. Investing in translating GOTV content and outreach materials ahead of time shows potentially higher engagement rates online.

62.55% video ad completion rates (Cantonese, Mandarin, Tagalog, and Vietnamese language GOTV video ads had the highest individual completion rates.)

42 volunteers recruited

23,800 voters called and 20,394 voters texted

Multi-language Campaign Strategy

In January 2020 Rising Voices of Asian American Families began thinking about expanding their reach through email, digital ads, and text. They invested in making GOTV materials accessible to AAPI communities in MI by leaning into translations for key languages and creating imagery that reflected the communities.

They invested in the following pillars of this strategy:

Building a robust multilingual team: Phone bankers and text bankers were multilingual and could speak to communities in their home languages. Rising Voices of Asian American Families also ensured that staff were multilingual in the key languages the communities spoke.

With regards to general team recruitment, they invested early in the summer and spring on a core group of phonebankers and Youth Leadership and Civic Engagement Fellows. This allowed them to set expectations early with the team to recruit additional volunteers. Setting expectations early and cultivating recruitment skills into programming paid dividends as fellows and phonebankers each recruited a significant number of volunteers.

Canvass and digital layering: Rising Voices of Asian American Families decided not to pull phonebank lists by language because the data was not accurate enough to run monolingual non-English language phonebanks, but since they had a canvass crew they could do manual call backs using the field data they were collecting. They coordinated phonebanking logistics in slack with volunteers to make it clear who needed to be canvassed in what language. The volunteers knew they were valued and they leaned into their own cultural competence which led to higher quality conversations.

In addition to having a call back system, they invested in 2 series of mailers that went out to 59,000 AAPI households.The mailers were translated into Bangla and Chinese. Rising Voices of Asian American Families knew there were no other organizations in MI who invested in this type of outreach for these specific communities. Originally Rising Voices of Asian American Families only had capacity to get mailers out to 30k households but with DIF’s support they were able to expand their reach to 59k homes.

They used text banking to ensure voters had turned in absentee ballots.They layered social media campaigns with texts they sent out so they could refer to these graphics during text campaigns. The graphics had details around the timeline and logistics related to voting. Rising Voices of Asian American Families wanted to make sure as much information was available up front to voters andsaw better results with this strategy.

For a multilingual layered canvass to work well, proper planning and effective marshalling of good information is especially critical. Rising Voices of Asian American Families’s Field Director spent a great deal of time on the front end compiling resources around deadlines and municipal-level logistics as well as compiling FAQs for phone and text bankers to refer to.

Multilingual Digital Ads: By October 2020, they layered in digital ads to their canvass using a lookalike universe based on the mailing list initially and then layered in more specific targeting using phone and text bank data. For digital ads, Rising Voices of Asian American Families worked with 2 different firms. They found that they needed to work with a firm that had experience running multilingual ads because there were small details most people could look over when setting up ads for other languages. For example, changing the browser settings to Chinese is important to ensure that the audience is included in the targeting for ads.

The digital ads were translated to Arabic, Vietamese, Tagalog, Korean, Bengali, Khmer, Cantonese, Hmong, Mandarin, and Spanish. The video rate completion for these ads was high overall, but they saw Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Tagalog had the highest completion rates. The ads were put up on Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads.

Creating a cast of characters: Rising Voices of Asian American Families worked with a graphic designer to generate “Count Every Vote” graphics with a cast of characters that showed the diversity of the community. There is not a large amount of AAPI stock photos that feel genuine, so having these graphics prepared ahead of time helped with avoiding repeating images.