Driving an Apathetic Audience to Action

Client: NYC VOTES
Company: The Soze Agency
Project Role: Senior Creative Strategist

The Opportunity:

NYC Votes is a non-partisan city government department that wanted to increase engagement and youth voter turnout for the 2021 New York City elections. While young voters (ages 18-29) represented the largest bloc of newly registered voters, only 13% of young people voted in the city’s 2017 elections, down from 63% in the national elections the year prior.

The assignment was to create a program boosting youth turnout across the city—and particularly in the Bronx, where turnout was lowest. With the City’s elections happening in an “off” year and following the 2020 Presidential elections (expected to suck up all the attention), we needed to find new ways to increase turnout and get more young people civically involved.

The Solution:

#WePowerNYC launched, using the 2020 election as a springboard, to capitalize on the outsized attention on the presidential elections and create educational, communications, and leadership platforms driving empowerment within young people’s communities and raising voter participation.

Having built a trusted foundation, we would further activate those youth voters to continue voting in the 2021 NYC Elections and build a lifelong generation of leaders and informed citizens.

The campaign launched in February 2020 with an all-day summit at Manhattan Community College in conjunction with City University of New York (CUNY) on voter rights, mobilization, and organizational leadership. Recruiting began for We Power NYC Ambassadors, who would become voting experts by participating in weekly meetings, engaging with local history, hosting Voter Mobilization events in their community, and sharing critical non-partisan information on their social media.

Covid-19 immediately caused the campaign to have to readjust and adapt. The planned town halls, event series, and activism-as-a-ticket model became a digital-focused plan.

We Power NYC Ambassadors ran multiple programs throughout the 2020 election cycle, including #WePowerWednesdays Instagram takeovers; letter writing events; hosting weekly meetings to discuss local issues, plan events, learn new skills, and build community; and phone banking ahead of the June 23rd, 2020 NY primary. Voter registration also remained a top priority, with We Power NYC joining CUNY Votes’ efforts to get 25,000+ young people registered and informed. We Power NYC also ran the 2020 “We The Young People” annual hearing, providing essential insights and perspectives from youth activists. The ambassadors regularly posted important messages directly to their peers via social media outreach.

Ahead of the 2021 elections, We Power NYC Ambassadors supported events like the Teens Take Charge Mayoral Debate and continued voter registration and education drives in all five boroughs.

As Senior Creative Strategist on this project, I ran youth focus groups to discover what issues mattered most to young voters and the challenges they faced. Based on their input, I then developed the campaign's strategy and initial launch plan while working with NYC Votes to ensure we maximized the opportunity and got the most young people involved.