A webinar presented to The Democracy Commitment community on October 23, 2013. The topic of the webinar is: What Schools Need To Do This Spring To Be Ready For Voter Engagement Next Fall

1. TurboVote//TDC Webinar
What Schools Need To Do This Spring to be
Prepared for Voter Engagement Next Fall
Sam Novey
TurboVote Director of Partnerships
sam@turbovote.org 410-903-6911

2. What TurboVote Does
• Support school efforts to institutionalize voter
engagement
• Build technology that makes it easier for
institutions to provide people with all the
information and materials that they need to vote
in every election from local to presidential.
Note: TurboVote is a non-profit, non-partisan
organization

3. Hot Summers in Baltimore

4. Strategic Voter Engagement
• Not linear (more time does not always
equal more results)
• Bottlenecks and empowering staff to
pursue strategies to institutionalize voter
engagement are key

5. Bottlenecks
• A bottleneck is a process like class
registration or freshman orientation that a
large number of students must go through
every year.
• Strategic voter engagement efforts focus
on integrating voter engagement into
bottleneck processes as the default for
each student.

6. Miami Dade College

7. University of North Georgia

8. University of Chicago

9. UNC-Charlotte

10. University of Florida

11. Bottleneck Planning: Fall 2013
• Identify your top three target bottleneck
processes
• Characteristics to consider:
– How many students go through this process?
– Does it happen in time for voting deadlines?
– Operational challenges?
– Bureaucratic challenges?

12. Bottleneck Planning: Spring 2014
• Planning for your bottleneck
– Which stakeholders do you need to engage?
– When do they need to be engaged?
– Put a meeting on the calendar for the relevant
staff members at the end of the semester
• Set expectation of voter engagement being a
default experience next fall
• What materials and support do staff need?
• Set check in dates to make sure they stay on track

13. Bottleneck Planning: Summer/Fall 2014
• Execute
– Check in with key implementers to keep
things on track
– Troubleshoot as issues come up
– Watch the sign ups roll in!

14. TurboVote Technology
• TurboVote builds technology that makes it
easier for institutions to institutionalize voter
engagement
• When they use TurboVote, colleges just need
to share a single link with students and get
them to complete a 90 second online
process.
– Then, the system automatically follows up with
each student to provide him or her with all the
information and materials needed to vote in all
elections from local to presidential.

15. TurboVote User Experience

16. TurboVote Partnerships
• Since 2012, over 200,000 voters have signed
up through partnerships with over 80 colleges,
30 non-profits, and Google.
• Partnerships features
– Co-branded user experience
– Free experience for students
– Data

17. Co-branded site

18. Co-branded email reminders

19. Covering student mailing costs

20. Data

21. More data

22. Wrap Up
• Strategic planning process is key to good
voter engagement
– Fall 2013: picking a bottleneck
– Spring 2014: planning for your bottleneck
– Summer/Fall 2014: execute
• TurboVote is a tool that makes it easier to
institutionalize voter engagement
• Contact: sam@turbovote.org, (410)-903-6911