Do you need some good news today?

Empowering Our Youth to Strengthen Our Democracy

November 1, 2024

Dear Debbie,

Do you need some good news today? We thought so! To help you keep your spirits up as the election approaches, we are reaching out with an update about the voter outreach that Students for Voting Justice has accomplished this fall with your incredible support.

Earlier this month, our 86 interns and many, many volunteers (including some of you!) mailed almost 200,000 beautifully decorated postcards to young, Black, registered but infrequent voters in NC, GA, and PA. Each card held an urgent message about what is at stake in this election and provided QR codes to link recipients to sites that will help them make a plan to vote.

Our interns are currently making follow-up phone calls to some of the same young voters in NC and GA, reiterating the messaging of the postcards and discussing how to make a plan to vote. One particularly engaged intern, Maya, has made almost 8,000 calls already! If there were an Olympic medal for phone banking, she would be a strong contender.

Finally, our intern-designed social media ads are taking our interns’ messages about the importance of voting far and wide. We have two goals with these ads. The first is to create positive social pressure to vote through the example and enthusiasm provided by the creators of the ads. The other goal is to provide access to a website (vote.org) where viewers can find the information they need to vote.

(Video by SVJ intern De'Ashia; Click the picture to watch. This is our top-performing ad so far!)

On Instagram, as of Oct 30 we had reached 1,609,552 young people so far across four states (NC, GA, PA, and MI) with 6,212,701 impressions, or views, for an average of about four views per person. By election day, each of those 1.6 million people will have seen our ads at least eight times. The Instagram ads have generated 11,987 link clicks to vote.org. They've also garnered 26,314 post reactions, 289 post saves, and 740 post shares. Our digital marketing team tells us that these engagement metrics are really great - especially the number of saves and shares!

(Left/top video by SVJ intern Marcus, Right/bottom video by SVJ Intern Jolie; Click the pictures to watch! Note: OOTD means "Outfit of the Day" and a "fit" is an outfit.)

On YouTube, we've received 3,686,684 impressions (views) so far. The most important metric for YouTube is video completion rate. The average video completion rate across the four states for our ads is an impressive 78.65%, with the highest video completion rates being in Michigan. By election day, we expect to have shown each YouTube account that we have targeted eight or more of our ads. So far, these ads have generated 791 link clicks to vote.org.

Click on the link below in the yellow rectangle to see our YouTube channel, where you can watch most of the rest of the ads that we are running both on YouTube and on Instagram. And here are links to two additional ads we are running only on Instagram, but you will need an Instagram account to view them: Intern Lauren's Video and Intern Alexandra's Video. All of these video ads were chosen based on market testing from over 150 ads that interns created.

SVJ Youtube Channel

While we can’t tell you what will happen on Tuesday, we can tell you that, thanks to you, we are doing everything in our power to mobilize young voters - both our interns and the many people they are reaching through their work. We know we are having an impact! The energy, creativity, dedication, and enthusiasm of our interns are awe-inspiring and keep us hopeful about the future of our country. We hope they do the same for you.

With hope for our democracy,

Claire Ullman & Sandra Radoff

Co-Directors

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Students for Voting Justice

c/o Center for Common Ground

PO Box 235, Ladysmith, VA 22501

Tax ID # 82-4589218

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