We The People Michigan’s experiments with layered deep canvassing: A case study from the Digital Innovation Fund

Written by Marium Navid on behalf of the Cooperative Impact Lab

Special thank you to Hoai An Pham, We The People Michigan, Cooperative Impact Lab, The Movement Cooperative, The Resilient Democracy Fund, and Way To Win.

The Problem

BIPOC voters in MI were regularly overlooked by national campaigns in voter engagement efforts. Often, the data in VAN is not accurate and the digital content (ads, social media, etc) does not cater to these communities. Through the Digital Innovation Fund, We The People Michigan received a $55,000 grant, as well as digital strategy coaching and data support to support their digital organizing experiments.

Key Questions

• How can campaigns engage voters who aren’t included in VAN?
• How can campaigns engage with BIPOC more meaningfully to increase election outcomes?
• What is the best messaging to use in P2P outreach and lead gen ads when targeting BIPOC?

The Learnings

Top Learnings: Investing in hiring canvassers from the community you are canvassing pays off in the long run. Race class narrative messaging in P2P texting and ad buys shows higher click through rates overall.

Volunteer retention rate was 80–90% for the deep canvassing program

315 volunteers were trained in total

35,000–40,000 voters were called and 200,000 voters were texted

During the 2020 election cycle, We the People MI notably experimented with the following areas of their electoral strategy to improve BIPOC engagement:

Deep Canvassing

We the People Michigan built a deep canvassing program covering 16 counties throughout the state where volunteers from each county could be plugged in to engage people from their respective counties. Volunteers used Spoke, an open source P2P SMS tool, as well as Thru Talk to engage with voters in deep canvassing around various issues ranging from anti racism to immigration.

Because We the People Michigan’s theory of change is centered around deep canvassing, volunteers were trained on how to hold hour-long transformative conversations using race class narrative (RCN) messaging to build long term power amongst the communities being reached.

The organizers who were hired were from the counties that were being canvassed. This investment resulted in more motivated teams, higher volunteer enthusiasm, higher volunteer retention, and more volunteer leadership development. Volunteers in each of the counties built extremely strong bonds and they have shared how supported they felt throughout the experience. Volunteers were even practicing canvassing to each other to practice their storytelling skills and how they could open up to strangers.

Both the texting platform and phone bank tool were used in conjunction with Every Action to ensure data in VAN could be updated for future use. Race class narrative messaging was also used in the P2P scripts. We the People Michigan found that the language that was specific around demographics and that used RCN messaging had higher link clicks than texts without RCN messaging.

Finally, We the People Michigan regularly shifted their messaging to meet the moment during the election season. For example, after the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the Black liberation protests, the deep canvass scripts shifted to focus on anti racism and staff were trained accordingly.

Digital Ad Buys

This election cycle was one of the first times We the People Michigan experimented with Facebook Ads. They used Facebook Ads to primarily overlay the deep canvass program. The ads helped to fill a gap in the electoral playing field in MI where very little messages used nuanced and community specific language. We the People Michigan used RCN messaging to stand out and connect with communities they were reaching out to.

Other ad buys on Instagram, Youtube, and Hulu were also done but were mostly centered around voter engagement and priming audiences for potential post election work. These ads helped to create a surround sound of messaging rooted in pushing Michiganders to invest in this election, but also invest in each other.

“Engage” ads worked a lot better than “reach” ads resulting in We the People Michigan having “above” or “above average” ads in a crowded field. The highest ad ended with 18,775 engagements and 12,000 Facebook post reactions.

Michiganders resonated with the “count every vote” language used in the ads and responded positively to RCN messaging.