Our tactics

As the only nonprofit behavioral design team in the progressive movement, we fill a critical gap: designing and quickly mainstreaming voter engagement tactics that help win elections.

Site-based vote tripling

Relational, or friend-to-friend, voter turnout is the most powerful turnout method, but can be difficult to scale. Site-based vote tripling (SBVT) is our latest approach to solving this challenge.  Formerly called high-traffic on the spot relational turnout — or HTOTS — SBVT is a relational turnout tactic that can help your program contact more of the hard-to-reach voters you need to contact to win.  

How does it work?

Canvassers ask pedestrians to text friends a voting reminder right then and there.

Pedestrians text five or more friends with information about voting.

Friends hear from a trusted source who knows just how to reach them — and then vote!

Why use SBVT?

It’s a randomized controlled trial (RCT) tested and proven tactic that produces an average of 32 relational contacts per hour — sometimes over 100 — which helps your program reach the people it needs to contact at a lower cost per voter. In a 2022 Georgia runoff randomized controlled trial, almost 25% of friends reached by SBVT were attempted an average of 7 times by other progressive groups without being successfully contacted.

Among 40,000 voters matched to the voter file in the 2022 Georgia runoff RCT …

  • 37% didn’t vote in the 2020 presidential election;

  • 52% didn’t vote in the 2022 midterm election;

  • 41% had a turnout score below 50;

  • 46% lacked a phone number on the voter file.

At Vote Rev, we support partners with implementation of SBVT and other tactics. Our support includes training, coaching, and data monitoring. Click below to get in touch:

Polling place vote tripling

Relational, or friend-to-friend, voter turnout is the most powerful turnout method, yet it is very difficult to scale. Our team’s evaluation of this problem led us to design a simple but effective solution that sparks non-activists to remind their friends to vote: polling place vote tripling (PPVT).

PPVT is a direct voter contact tactic where canvassers stand outside of targeted polling locations at a safe, social distance and ask voters—who are feeling a civic high because they just voted—to remind three of their friends to vote.

Dozens of major partners, including the Biden-Harris campaign, used this new tactic in 2020—resulting in 94,000 hours of PPVT canvassing that produced 1,100,000 relational conversations. That’s more than five times the 200,000* relational conversations that the Biden-Harris campaign sparked with their relational app.

We know from the success of 2020 and fifteen prototyping pilots in the field that PPVT is one of the most effective ways for a canvasser to take action during Early Vote and on Election Day. PPVT has been featured in The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.

Let our team support you.

We value deep partnerships, and will work side by side with you to design and implement tactics that work. Our training and coaching services are designed to give back your staff’s most valuable resource: its time. If you’re interested in learning more about our free training and coaching, or just want to say hello, click the button below to get in touch.