Mobilizing Young Voters: An Interview with Andy Roo Forrest and Genessa Krasnow

 

 

Note: The transcript of this interview provided below has been edited for style and concision. For this reason, it may deviate in part from the podcast and video.  

Harvard Political Review: What led you both to start Feel Good Voting? When did you found the organization, and how has it evolved since then?

Genessa Krasnow: Andy was working with a behavioral change media company called Population Media Center, which focused on women’s reproductive rights and well-being throughout the world. Andy and I started talking about creating a values-based media company, and as we were doing this, we were playing with a lot of different ideas. Around the same time, he looked at me and said, “We should do something around getting out the vote.” That was back [in] January and early February, and that led to us launching Feel Good Voting.

Andy Forrest: I think that, as an activist, one might always think, “How can I have the biggest impact on the issues? How can I just take what’s inside of me and make the biggest contribution to the common good?” So I’m very obsessed with mass media. I think it’s the most powerful and underused tool to create positive change. And Genessa completely sees that because she’s [been] a storyteller — both when she was at Microsoft and other companies that she started as well — and so we are really centered around [asking], “How do we use media to build social justice and environmental sustainability?” That is why we are really focused on the November election.

HPR: Different campaigns and non-profit groups have tried a multitude of methods to mobilize disenchanted young voters. What inspired you to work with influencers on social media to turn out the youth vote?

AF: There are a lot of groups that are working to get out the vote. Any of these groups – like many people in politics – are obsessed with the issues. They feel like, “If we could just explain the issues to you clearly, you would agree with us and then you would take action by voting or some other action.” But that’s not actually the way that people make decisions. And if you look at the behavioral science data, people make decisions based on their peer group and based on the influencers or the role models that they follow. We’re so polarized in this country because people tend to think like those around them. So we use behavioral science principles on social media. And one of the key pieces of behavioral science media, as shown by Albert Bandura of Stanford University and all those folks who came after him, is that the messenger is more important than the message. And so micro-influencers, which we define as figures with 10,000 to 200,000 followers, have a more loyal, trusted type of follower community than mega-influencers or celebrities. We partner with micro-influencers to weave a voting message into their programming. The most successful piece of media we’ve had to date is a dancing video on TikTok that has voting captions on it. This is what behavioral scientists would call indirect messaging. We’re going after people so they can bond with an influencer and then bring voting into the conversation.

GK: What we are discovering is that there are so many people hungering to help advance progressive causes in our country. We have tapped into people who are just eager to participate and didn’t know exactly what they could do. So there’s a deep enthusiasm [among] the micro-influencers. They are overjoyed at the opportunity to create messages to help inspire people who follow them to vote.

HPR: There is a common refrain that young people use social media to escape from reality. In your collaborations with “micro-influencers,” have you encountered any unexpected hurdles in this strategy, such as young people reacting negatively to seeing a political message even from a trusted source?

GK: I know a young person in my life who’s a stand-up comedian. Her messages would be perfect because they’re irreverent and kind of sardonic. And when we asked her if she wanted to participate in our initiative, she said, “Most of my followers are non-voters, and I don’t want to risk offending them.” So we were like “That’s perfect! They’re our target demographic!” And she was really afraid of upsetting her audience and losing fans. It’s understandable: she hasn’t exploded in popularity yet and wants to be smart and savvy about what she’s doing, but I think she would’ve done really well with us. So, like Andy said, there are some people that don’t fit the mold. But I’m not sure it’s true that teenagers are using social media to escape from reality. I think social media is reality for people, especially in the time of COVID-19. Andy and I founded this company before the COVID-19 pandemic. We knew we were going to do an all-digital engagement, but we didn’t know how important digital interaction was going to become because of the virus. And what we’re discovering is that a lot of people want to do something to make the world better. What we know is that, if a message doesn’t ring authentic, it’s not going to work with the demographic of under-30 non-voters or potential voters. So authenticity is the main thing we’re running up against. If an influencer [says], “This isn’t authentic to me. I can’t do this,” then they’re not the right influencer for us to work with. 

None of us expected there to be a social uprising in the middle of this pandemic either. Social media has allowed for a number of things. We know the depth and intensity of Black Lives Matter because we are seeing what is happening to Black lives on social media. Social media has organized protests around the country, around the world actually, where people have been able to tap in because of their social media channels. It is where people are getting their source of information, and we can tap into creating a sense of consciousness and a sense of solidarity. It feels good to participate. It feels good to make your voice heard.

HPR: What is your target demographic and why did you choose that group? Within that group, are there any specific sub-groups that you’re pursuing with this strategy?

AF: We were very influenced by a Knight Foundation report called the 100 Million Project, which mapped 12,000 non-voters across the country and showed, particularly, that the majority of those non-voters were 18 to 30 years old. But when you look at the demographics of that group, you see that, if they do vote, communities of color, young people, and women vote overwhelmingly for social justice and environmental sustainability policies. We go after those communities and try to engage and energize them because they have the greatest odds of voting towards those issues which are important to us.

GK: For some reason, in some sort of propaganda machine, the act of voting has become the status quo. Actually, the act of voting is the biggest form of revolution. That’s where change happens. We recently lost a great leader in John Lewis, and he fought his entire life to secure the right to vote for African Americans. And when we tap into the fact that there’s voter suppression and obstacles that are preventing people from exercising their right as citizens, it’s really frightening. It’s becoming more important for the young people of our country, who are creating our future, to understand that when they vote, they get to have a voice in the change they want to see. Since young people outnumber older voters, young people could really be setting the course. We need the majority to show up, and the majority is in that youth vote.

HPR: Come November, how will you quantify the impact of Feel Good Voting’s efforts to mobilize youth voters? How do you plan to evaluate the success of the micro-influencer strategy?

AF: We put links on all of the media. We put unique URL codes to track the actual message of both the media and the influencer, so we can tell which influencers and messages are effective. We want to evaluate as we go, and we’re doing that on a daily basis. There are really three ways that we can evaluate our impact in the long run. We can look at KPIs [key performance indicators] on the internet, which tell us whether we’re winning a popularity contest, which is important in our model because we’re not doing paid campaign ads but viral-type videos. Popularity does correspond to our reach. But all of our links that we put next to the media allow people to effortlessly slide right into our voting tools. You can register to vote, request a ballot by mail, [and] find your nearest polling place by clicking on the link. We hope, further down the road, to do randomized control trials because we believe we are creating the most cost-effective means of engaging a voter who’s interested in social justice and environmental policy. We would look at a treatment group of people who saw the messages and a control group of people who didn’t see messages, and then compare that to the actual voting rolls of those who showed up and voted after the election. In this country, we don’t know who you voted for, but we can tell if you voted, so we can compare that to people who saw our messages and people who didn’t see our messages.

GK: I would just add a heartfelt component to that which isn’t measured by data. It’s measured in the enthusiasm of the people that we work with and the people we’re partnering with and their continued desire to work with us. We’ve just started seeing content this month and we’re seeing some of those KPIs coming back and showing us how we’re doing. I think at the end of this, come November 3, we’re going to have an entire team of hundreds of people who have worked with us. My guess is that they’re going to continue wanting to work with us because what we do matters.

Duncan Glew is a member of the influencer communication team at Feel Good Voting.

Image Credits: J. Michael Tucker, Neale Eckstein