Blue waves: Do 2 waves of primary GOTV postcards increase voter turnout?
This study sought to determine if voter turnout among low-to-mid turnout propensity, high support voters could be improved by sending a GOTV/voter education postcard to voters ahead of each of the 2020 state and presidential primaries in Florida, Georgia, and Minnesota.
A culture of voting: Does early, repeated voter contact help boost odd year voter turnout?
This study sought to determine if sending 3 waves of handwritten postcards to high support, mid-low turnout propensity voters could increase voter turnout for the 2019 Virginia, Louisiana, and Mississippi primary and general elections.
The ladder of engagement: Can we move volunteers from lower stakes to higher stakes volunteering?
This pilot study explored whether showing volunteers an educational video about the relative value of various volunteer activities could move them “up the ladder of engagement” to more high stakes volunteer activities.
The skill of the chase: Do chaser postcards help to amplify the utility of an earlier voter contact?
This pilot study tested whether sending a handwritten postcard to a voter, to follow up on a successful voter contact made by a campaign earlier that year, could increase voter turnout.
State legislatures in the 2020 election: what happened?
None of the state chambers targeted by Democrats flipped in 2020. As in any complex system, many factors likely contributed to these results. Let’s take a look at three possible groups of explanations that may have contributed to state legislative outcomes: gerrymandering, roll-off/ticket-splitting, and enthusiasm/awareness gap. This analysis aims to describe what happened, but not […]
Crowding at the ballot box: Voter responses to crowdedness and voting methods during the age of COVID-19
Sister District Action Network (SDAN) teamed up with Dr. Josh Ackerman and PhD candidate Iris Wang from the University of Michigan to conduct a randomized controlled trial via survey in July 2020 in order to investigate the effect of Covid-19 on voter thoughts and attitudes.
Friendraising works: Exploring message type and sender and their effects on friendraising
Sister District Action Network (SDAN) ran this study to explore the efficacy of friendraising, or leveraging personal relationships to raise money for candidates, by comparing two different email message frames, as well as comparing the efficacy of friendraising emails to the efficacy of traditional candidate fundraising emails sent from Sister District Project HQ.
Voter registration chase: A head to head comparison of postcards and letters
Sister District Action Network (SDAN) and the Voter Participation Center (VPC) conducted an experiment in April-May 2020 directly comparing the efficacy of postcards and letters as chaser communications to improve the response rate to voter registration forms.
Texting out the vote: Do GOTV texts help motivate voters to the polls?
Abstract: Sister District Action Network (SDAN) and the Mississippi NAACP (MS NAACP) partnered to conduct an experiment around GOTV text messaging during the days leading up to the general election in Mississippi on November 5, 2019. The study targeted predominantly Black / African-American voters whose prior voting history indicated they would be unlikely to vote […]
Activism in the Age of COVID-19: a Study
How has the coronavirus pandemic affected grassroots volunteering? Our new research finds out.
