The pilot tripled efficiency from the already successful and enlightening 2018 Ohio program. At the end of the 5 week programs, each canvass hour was found to have resulted in a potential .52 net votes. This works out to be something in the range of $80-150 per net vote.

Author: Deliver My Vote and Organizing Empowerment

One of the most exciting challenges in get-out-the-vote (GOTV) research is the development and implementation of unusually powerful methods of increasing turnout, which Green and Gerber (2019, p.187) refer to as “supertreatments.” An especially promising avenue for research and development, they suggest, is organizing within one’s own social networks.

Author: Green and McClellan, February 2020

Every election cycle, there is a flood of volunteers signing up at campaign headquarters, as well as lots of Democratic activists wondering how they can help from home. Based on hundreds of turnout studies run by progressive organizations, we have some general guidelines about how to best channel volunteers’ energies into turning out more voters (and/or votes).

Overall, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to what is the best use of volunteer time. A key the driving force behind the decision of how to prioritize use of volunteer labor comes down to, within each mode (e.g., canvass, phonebank, letter writing), how many voter contact attempts a volunteer can conduct in an hour.

Author: Analyst Institute, October 2018

We are thrilled to announce the ten recipients of the 2019 Innovation Fund Grant, six testing in 2019 and four in 2020. This is Analyst Institute’s second-ever DRF (in collaboration with Civic Innovation Works), and we were grateful and excited to partner with America Votes on this important effort.

We were overwhelmed in the best possible way by the large number of submissions and wide range of innovative ideas. Out of a competitive pool of 127 applicants, the Fund chose a total of 10 projects. We’re eager to share what we’ll learn across all 10 tests about successful tactics that can be more fully deployed in the November 2020 election and beyond.

Author: Analyst Institute, January 2020

The tumultuous months since the 2016 election have brought a groundswell of activism across the country aimed at empowering and mobilizing America’s most underrepresented communities. At Analyst Institute, we strive to ensure that these efforts—and the leaders and funders who support them—are informed by the latest evidence-driven research and recommendations.

In that spirit, we proudly announce the release of Analyst Institute’s 2018 Annual Research Report: Civic Engagement Lessons and Funder Recommendations. The findings and recommendations highlighted in the report stem from over a decade of research, spanning hundreds of field experiments across the civic engagement community.

Author: Analyst Institute, July 2018

Faith in Action is a national network of faith-based organizations that uses community organizing to build political power on behalf of low-income constituencies of color. In 2018, they partnered with Analyst Institute to test the efficacy of a volunteer phone program that relied on messaging around the local sheriff’s race in Hillsborough County, Florida, as well as a paid GOTV phone program, exploring ways to boost turnout among a universe that is less engaged during midterm elections.

Author: Analyst Institute, November 2019

Broockman and Roeder found that the trends of effectiveness for different tactics hold for Hispanics: tactics that are less effective with the general public are also less effective with Hispanics, while tactics that are more effective with the general public are also more effective with Hispanics. They also found that Hispanics respond at least as well to every tactic compared to the general public. Importantly they found that voter engagement tactics that are successful with all voters are also successful just with Hispanics.

Author: Yale University, New Organizing Institute, September 2010

Additional guidance, sample scripts, and relational voter turnout toolkit can be found in the 2018 GOTV Tools and Materials supplement.

Author: Analyst Institute, 2018

During the 2018 general election, OutreachCircle (formerly VoterCircle) collaborated with state Democratic parties in California, Maryland, and New Jersey to evaluate the OutreachCircle program. Registered voters in the state were randomly assigned to be contacted by party volunteers (90%) or a control group that would not receive attention from the OutreachCircle program. After volunteers downloaded the app, their contacts were matched to the voter file. Volunteers were instructed to mobilize contacts who matched against the voter file and were assigned to the treatment group. Official voter turnout records were used to verify the turnout status of all matched contacts (i.e., treatment and control).

Author: OutreachCircle, August 2019

Planned Parenthood Votes (PPV) was interested in engaging more voters and having a larger impact on voter turnout in 2018.

Previous experiments have found substantial effects of relational voter contact programs on voter turnout. PPV partnered with Analyst Institute to test the impact of their volunteers conducting GOTV to their family, friends, and neighbors.

Author: Planned Parenthood Votes, Analyst Institute, November 2019

The purpose of this paper is to measure whether a different sender for each email blast improves performance. 50,000 individuals were randomly assigned to receive email from a different sender while 96,572 individuals were randomly assigned to a control group with email from the same sender. The individuals were selected from the HCAN membership list. Emails were sent between November 23rd and December 4th, 2009. The treatment group received three emails from three different senders while the control group received these emails from the same sender as always. The treatment emails had higher open rates than the control emails. Once the treatment group began receiving the same emails from the same sender as the control group, the treatment group continued to show a higher open rate.

Author: New Organizing Institute, January 2011

Voces de la Frontera Action is a membership-based community organization and worker center led by Latinx and immigrant workers. They seek to increase the Latinx vote to impact electoral outcomes in Wisconsin. In 2018, Voces de la Frontera Action partnered with Analyst Institute to test the impact of relational voter engagement on turnout as a part of the Analyst Institute’s Directed Research Fund.

Author: Analyst Institute, September 2019

Win Justice, a coalition of Center for Community Change Action, Color of Change PAC, Planned Parenthood Votes, and the Service Employees International Union, was formed in 2018 to engage their constituencies to win key elections in battleground states. Win Justice partnered with Analyst Institute to test the effectiveness of their relational voter turnout program and assess how it compares to a non-relational GOTV program.

Author: Analyst Institute, Win Justice, August 2019

This toolkit includes the materials and guidance to help you use RVT during every phase of your campaign.

This toolkit covers training staff on GOTV and RVT in August/September, to canvassing in November.

Author: Analyst Institute, July 2018

This worksheet should be given to volunteers when they are reaching out to people in their network for a relational voter turnout program. It makes the process easy for volunteers by clearly explaining how and why the campaign is using this strategy. It also makes the information easy to collect for organizers.

Author: Analyst Institute, July 2018

Building on their 2016 research, Faith in Action partnered with Analyst Institute in 2018 to evaluate the effectiveness of their relational voter turnout program as well as explore the downstream effect of relational voter turnout programs on post-election action-taking outcomes.

Author: Analyst Institute, November 2019

Organizing and Empowerment Project created Empower (formerly MyRVPList) to serve as a tool to help organizations facilitate relational voter engagement programs. At its heart, Empower is a platform designed to help volunteers have multi-month conversations with voters in their networks in a targeted and prioritized way. In 2018, Organizing and Empowerment Project partnered with Analyst Institute to test the effectiveness of relational voter turnout using the Empower platform.

Author: Empower, Analyst Institute, November 2019

This worksheet should be given to volunteers when implementing relational voter turnout programs to clarify common misconceptions and concerns about RVT.

Author: Analyst Institute, July 2018

We are excited to announce the recipients of the 2018 Relational Voter Engagement Directed Research Fund. Analyst Institute partnered with Civic Innovation Works and Civic Innovation USA earlier this year to start this innovative research fund because we believe that scaled relational voter turnout programs can be one of the keys to victory in 2020 and beyond. The promise of relational voter contact was too great and the need for significant research was too urgent to wait; we chose to pursue a structured fund in order to maximize what we could learn in 2018.

Author: Analyst Institute, October 2018

This is the list of 2018 civic engagement experiments conducted by Analyst Institute. Click here to their Relational voter toolkit.

Author: Analyst Institute, October 2019