The Texas Freedom Network’s experiments with influencer marketing: A case study from the Digital Innovation Fund

Written by Marium Navid on behalf of the Cooperative Impact Lab

Special thank you to the Texas Freedom Network, Cooperative Impact Lab, The Movement Cooperative, The Resilient Democracy Fund, and Way To Win.

The Problem

Texas Freedom Network (TFN) only recently started taking advantage of their digital presence with slight experimentation in the influencer field before the 2020 election. They recognized they needed to turn out younger people of color and wanted to use the election season as an opportunity to learn if influencer work can be effective in increasing voter turnout. Through the Digital Innovation Fund, TFN received a $15,000 grant, and data support and coaching to support their influencer marketing experiments.

Key Questions

• How can progressive organizations use influencer platforms to increase their organization’s reach to young POC?
• What types of influencers should the organizations work with to reach their target demographic and what should the process look like?

The Learnings

Top Takeaways: Invest in educating influencer partners on the voter registration process and be willing to trust staff’s expertise in knowing the community’s social landscape well enough to identify influencers to work with.

Successfully launched 5 influencer campaigns promoting TFN endorsed candidates

Research Strategy

Starting in January 2020, TFN used Upfluence to help find an initial list of influencers that aligned with TFN’s goals. The trouble with this process was that there were not a lot of younger (18–30 year olds) progressive influencers who were based in Texas. As a result, TFN turned to their own staff and the network of people they worked with to identify potential influencers. They also went through their follower lists and partner follower lists to identify folks in Texas with a strong enough (10k or over followers) social following.

When they had a list compiled, staff vetted influencers by going through their profiles to determine if any of them were vocal on issues TFN aligned with. For example, if TFN found a BLM post on an influencer’s profile, they may be willing to discuss the potential of partnering.

Another requirement was having a swipe up feature. Because of the complicated user flow to get registered to vote in Texas, the swipe up feature was necessary to get conversions. (You need 10k followers to get this feature.) In some cases, TFN would find influencers with these qualifications, but they would have moved outside of Texas by the time they were in contact. Oftentimes these influencers had higher rates because they had built larger followings, so TFN decided to invest in influencers who were locally based instead.

Influencer content had an organic reach of 277,841 over Instagram

Working with Influencers

After influencers were ready to partner, TFN invested time in making sure they were educated on the voting process and able to answer questions followers might bring up. TFN used the influencer work to supplement electoral work by asking them to promote TFN’s digital canvass program. Some influencers only wanted to promote GOTV content and others were open to promoting electoral endorsements, but needed sufficient time to review candidates. TFN increased the pay band for these reasons.

TFN used Instagram as it’s primary platform. Instagram was challenging because acquisition links had small windows because the platform is increasingly suppressing non-paid content. TFN also tested the same content from Instagram on Tik Tok and saw that the content performed well on Tik Tok too. They are planning on investing in this more in the future.

The primary observation from working with these influencers is that it is clear that they can be a great tool for culture change work. They can easily serve as a community megaphone for campaigns.

Eventually TFN had so much success with the influencers they were working with, that other influencers started organically reaching out to them to work with them as well. TFN is planning on expanding this strategy into the 2021 legislative cycle campaigns.

The top influencer’s posts had a reach of 45k