In the 2012 presidential election, only 59% of eligible Americans voted. As low as that seems, it was the best turnout since 1968. Turnout hasn’t always been this low. In the 19th century, 70-90% of eligible Americans voted in local and presidential elections. Why the change in turnout? And what can we learn from this trend that’s relevant to your organization’s elections?

Sasha Issenberg, author of The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, says “the robust culture of civic participation of post-Civil War America did more to boost voter turnout than all of the billions of dollars in modern campaigning could ever do.”

Back then, political campaigns brought the party to town — carnivals, parades and speeches. A higher percentage of Americans were engaged in civic culture — discussing issues with local politicians, reading books on political philosophy and listening to debates that lasted several hours. But, by the 1920s, government became more centralized, elections were held less frequently and political parties shifted their campaign spending to broadcast media.

“Radio broadcasts replaced mass meetings and all-day orations,” says Mark Lawrence Kornbluh, author of Why America Stopped Voting. “As the role of voters became increasingly passive, it is little wonder that their enthusiasm for electoral politics waned.”

Modern efforts to increase turnout in presidential campaigns have focused on making it easier to vote — early voting, absentee ballots, mailed ballots — but turnout hasn’t increased. Is there a parallel with association and other membership organization elections, most of whose members are also passive receivers of broadcast messaging from their organization?

In our 2012 Votenet Index of Association and Non-Profit Voting and Election Trends, voter apathy was mentioned more than any other reason as a cause for poor election turnout. The survey participants, primarily association staff, believe voting is important, but they don’t think their members feel the same. Based on turnout reports, they’re right!

Donald P. Green, Professor of Political Science at Columbia University (and featured speaker at our next webinar) told me, “People get enured to skipping elections. Voting is habit-forming so by not voting in local elections, they cultivate the bad habit of not voting in presidential elections.” When asked how this phenomenon applies to associations and other membership organizations, he said, “There’s not a strong sense of obligation on the members’ part. Elections are seen as pro forma and uninteresting.”

Members give many reasons for not voting:

• The election outcome doesn’t have an impact on me.
• My one vote doesn’t make a difference.
• One candidate is just as good as another.
• My vote is merely a rubberstamp of a pre-selected slate.
• I don’t have time to vote.
• I don’t know enough about the candidates or issues.

Members are more likely to vote, Green said, if they have a sense of commitment to or involvement with their organization, or if the election results are truly relevant or important to them. However, if these factors are not present, you can motivate them to vote by removing mental, logistical and cultural barriers and by using persuasive tactics to get them to the “polls.”

This is the first in a series of posts where we’ll share governance and election strategies and marketing and mobilization tactics that will turn passive, apathetic members into active, frequent voters.

Transform your apathetic, passive members!
(photo by Detlef Reichardt/Flickr CC)

Here’s a little known fact about the Votenet team – we’re wannabe behavioral scientists.

On our internal Yammer network, we share articles, posts and even academic papers about election and voting field experiments. We invite leading scientists to our office to talk to us about voter mobilization. Why are we such geeks?

Because voter turnout is a problem for many organizations that we’re determined to solve. The more we learn about the science of increasing voter turnout, the better we can help you motivate and mobilize your members and constituents to vote.

Now it’s your chance to meet one of our favorite professors, the godfather of voter turnout and mobilization research – Dr. Donald P. Green, Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and author of Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout.

On Wednesday, June 26 at 1:00 p.m. Eastern, Don will be joining us for a 40-minute webinar: Everyone is Doing It! Apply the Science of Social Persuasion to Voter Mobilization.

Don will share recent findings from his research and experiments on what makes people vote, and will explain how you can apply these lessons to your own elections and voting events. We’ll also talk about the delicate balance that your campaigns must strike between engaging and annoying your voters.

You don’t want to miss this one!

What: Everyone is Doing It! Apply the Science of Social Persuasion to Voter Mobilization

When: Wednesday, June 26 at 1:00 p.m. Eastern

Where: GoToWebinar (details will be sent to you upon registering)

Cost: Complimentary, of course.

Register: Sign up for the webinar here.

If you have any questions about the webinar, please contact Jenn Barton at Votenet.

Photo by Josh Thompson/Flickr CC

Here are our favorite posts this week about voting, election marketing and crowd decision-making.

Reputation Can Trump Money (Science Daily)

A study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences proves we do the right thing when we know people are watching. “We wanted to see how observability compares to a cash incentive for getting people to act to benefit the common good.” Using an energy reduction program as an experiment, researchers found that “financial incentives boosted participation only slightly, but making participation in the program observable — through the use of sign-up sheets posted in apartment buildings — produced a three-fold increase in sign-ups.”

How can you put the observability motivator to work in your elections? During the election, publish the names of those who have voted on your website or members-only community. National associations could sort it by state to make it easier for members to notice which colleagues haven’t followed through on their civic duty. Or, allow members to display an “I voted” digital badge on their association and public profiles.

Why Don’t People Vote? (Gwen Sharp, PhD, Sociological Images)

Using census data, Dr. Sharp created a pie chart showing the reasons why registered voters didn’t vote in the 2008 election. “The single most common reason (17.5%) for not voting was that the person was too busy or their schedule conflicted with available voting hours.” Keep this in mind as you choose your voting methods and develop your election marketing strategy. The entire voting process — learning about candidates, getting onto the voting platform and selecting candidates — must be quick and easy.

Everything That You know About Spam Is Wrong (Peter Campbell, Techcafeteria)

If that headline doesn’t make you click on a link, I don’t know what will. What an eye opener! Campbell explains:

“While every mail service has their own methods, the large ones, like Gmail and Yahoo!, are doing big data analysis and establishing sender reputations based on how often their emails are actually opened and/or read. You probably have a sender score, and you want it to be a good one.”

He provides advice on maintaining a good sender reputation. Basically, focus on list quality, not quantity.

How Online Petitions Combat Corruption Abroad (Zoe Fox, Mashable)

We’ve seen how social media has helped citizens around the world make their voices heard. Online petition sites, like Change.org, are also helping citizens organize and protest against corrupt governments, in fact, nearly half of the top international petitions focus on corruption. Change.org’s Director of Global Campaigns Patrick Schmitt said, “The fascinating thing is that a few successful campaigns plant the seeds in people’s heads that they can lead a movement, small or large.” How cool is that?

CNN Lets Readers Play Editor (Peter Sterne, New York Observer)

Tired of the usual cable news fare – repeats of minor, sensationalist, so-called breaking news? Now you can tell CNN columnist John Sutter which stories you’d like him to cover. His “Change the List” project asks viewers to vote for five out of a selection of twenty stories. Sterne says:

“Most of the twenty stories that Mr. Sutter proposed are the kinds of unsexy public interest journalism more likely found on PBS than CNN: places in the U.S. where no one has Internet or toilet paper, countries wracked by polio and leprosy, the effects of extreme poverty on children. Mr. Sutter hopes that the audience’s engagement with the story—they chose it, after all—will lead people to get involved and work for change.”

Cool Client Idea of the Week

In a quest for blog post ideas, don’t forget about your webinars. The International City/County Management Association (ICMA) published a recap on its blog of one of its recent webinars. Blog posts about webinars can also be repurposed for newsletter content too.

If you’ve missed one of our Votenet webinars, you can find recaps on this blog about our two most recent ones: Team Obama’s science of voter mobilization and using voting data to plan successful elections.

Client Tweet of the Week

Today’s presidential election in Iran is in the news and on people’s minds. The Council of Foreign Relations gathered all their resources on Iran in one place so the press and the public have a “one-stop-shop” when searching for information. Notice the #Iran hashtag – a good way to get extra eyes on your tweet, but use those hashtags sparingly.

Crowd Vote of the Week

Here’s one for the DC crowd, especially those of you who work downtown. Is your building in the annual Golden Streets landscaping and flower competition? The Golden Triangle Business Improvement District will give the tenants of the winning building an ice cream party – the perfect treat for a steamy DC summer day. Voting ends today so head on over and pick the winner!

Enjoy your weekend!

Photo by Matthew Rutledge (Flickr CC)

Here are our favorite posts this week about elections, voting, strategic planning, crowdsourcing and more.

Learn from LEGO: Alan Moore on How to Future-Proof Your Business (Caitlin Fitzsimmons, Business Review Weekly)

Companies react in two different ways to disruption. Nokia and the music industry failed to adapt and went downhill. However, LEGO made changes to its research and development, production and marketing practices and survived. “By listening to customers, LEGO turned product development on its head and future-proofed its business.” Alan Moore, author of No Straight Lines: Making Sense of Our Non-Linear World, says:

“We need to be the creators and makers of the future. Craftsmen or craftswomen are always in ‘beta’; they are always thinking about how things can change or improve. Organizations, on the other hand, are designed to work at 100 per cent efficiency and don’t have that culture of craftsmanship but if you’re being disrupted, you can’t keep doing things in the same way.”

Why Good Doesn’t Get to Great (Mark Athitakis, Associations Now)

Strategic planning is a hot topic in the association community, mainly because many associations still take the wrong approach. Or, as Anna Caraveli said in a post we previously highlighted, associations need “strategic thinking capabilities rather than strategic planning processes.”

Athitakis reports on a survey about strategic planning processes conducted by the Association for Strategic Planning in collaboration with the University of Arkansas Department of Political Science. “Overall, the study’s authors argue, the most successful organizations are the most strategic ones, and the ones that are most disciplined about adhering to the plans they create.” He suggests that struggling organizations commit to strategic thinking, “especially if what’s holding you back is the kind of board that wants an hour-long discussion about HQ’s A/C bill rather than a serious discussion about the future of the organization.”

Free Download of the 2013 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report Now Available (Tony Rossell, Membership Marketing Blog)

Marketing General recently released their 2013 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report. Tony Rossell says, “This marks the fifth year that Marketing General Incorporated (MGI) has surveyed associations to better understand what is going on in the membership market and what is working best to recruit members, engage new members, renew existing members, and reinstate former members.”

MGI’s membership marketing report is a benchmark report that every association professional should keep handy, along with our Votenet Index of Association and Non-Profit Voting and Election Trends.

The 15 Countries with the Highest Quality of Life (Business Insider)

Does voting make you happy? It turns out that voter turnout (civic engagement) correlates with the happiness of a country’s citizens, according to the Better Life Index report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The index includes eleven categories: housing, income, jobs, community, education, the environment, civic engagement, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance. 

Email Writing: Top 5 Rookie Mistakes to Avoid (Heather Buchheim, M&R Research Labs)

Buchheim said she learned to write “pithy, emotional emails” from some of the best in the biz, but it “took years of practice and loads of tracked changes.” Save yourself years of lackluster results by checking out her advice for avoiding the worst rookie mistakes.

Don’t Let This Happen to You!

I’ve seen several headlines recently about awards voting gone wrong due to fraud and ballot box stuffing, technology failure or erroneous tabulation. These issues have major consequences on the integrity and reputation of the awards, not to mention the emotional impact on contestants. (“Congratulations, you’re Miss Canada!” 24 hours later: “Oh, no, sorry, you’re not.”) When you pick a voting platform, do your homework so you can be sure it provides the highest level of security, accuracy and reliability.

Cool Client Idea of the Week

You see some pretty lame questions being asked on Twitter and Facebook pages just because social media managers are desperate to encourage interaction. I like Pace University’s approach: ask an interesting question that provides useful information to your audience.

Crowd Vote of the Week

Does your Main Street need a little sprucing up? You can log onto the paint manufacturer Benjamin Moore’s Paint What Matters website and vote for a community that deserves a renovation. Benjamin Moore will donate paint, supplies, painters and color consultants to the 20 winning Main Streets.

Client Tweet of the Week

Twitter doesn’t have to be all business. If you find something interesting and useful to read, even if it’s not industry-related, why not share it with your followers? The Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies did that with a New York Times article yesterday. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to get my own pick-me-up.

Enjoy your weekend!

Not a Votenet office. Really. (photo by Jemimus/Flickr CC)

Here are our favorite posts this week about elections, participatory culture, governance, associations and cooperatives.

Crowdscience: 10 Must Do’s to Generate Innovative, Catalytic and Disruptive Ideas…Every Time (Ahmad Ashkar, Huffington Post)

Ashkar, CEO and founder of the Hult Prize, the world’s largest student competition, says “the biggest hurdle…with social impact crowdsourcing is not building a website or finding applicants. The key problem would-be crowdsourcers face: lack of methodology. Without a sure-fire recipe for success, initiatives run the risk of becoming a waste of time or a stale marketing program.”

In this post, he shares their secret sauce: the process for crowdscience that helps them generate innovative ideas for solving social problems. Associations and other organizations could use his methodology to crowdsource solutions and ideas for association or industry challenges.

Tales from the Board Room: Balancing Interests on the Board (BoardLink, American Bar Association)

An ABA tweet alerted me to this excellent resource for association governance. Although written for the bar association audience, this “tale from the board room” and the accompanying “best board practice” will help anyone who is dealing with board members who aren’t seeing the big picture.

Co-op: Shopping Where You Own the Place (G. Jeffrey MacDonald, Christian Science Monitor)

MacDonald says cooperatives are increasing membership and revenues, and, consequently, changing the face of the economy. His article takes a look at three types of member-owned companies: grocery co-ops, credit unions and mutual insurance firms.

Gone Forever: What to Do When a Member Dies (Holly Duckworth, Leadership Solutions International)

Many organizations have policies and procedures in place that spell out what to do when a member (or one of their family members) dies. The response usually depends on the member’s position within the organization. In case you don’t have a policy in place, or if you’re making your own personal outreach, Duckworth provides advice that will help you decide what to do.

Optimizing for Mobile? Don’t Forget Your Subject Line. (Katie Lewis, The Emma Blog)

We like sharing resources about email marketing because our research has shown that it’s one of the most effective ways to spur voter turnout. Lewis reminds us: “Smart phones only display five or six words of your email’s subject line, so the gist of your message needs to be conveyed in about 20-30 characters when in portrait orientation.” It’s not easy to break old email habits, so you might have to post a checklist somewhere close by so you remember tips like this when sending emails.

Cool Client Idea of the Week

The Association of Art Museum Directors helps members connect to each other by letting everyone know when one of them has joined Twitter. Members can also subscribe to one of their Twitter lists: member museums, member directors and media. Their active Twitter stream has prime real estate on the association’s home page.

Client Tweet of the Week

The American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese doesn’t host the weekly Twitter #langchat, but they make sure their members and followers know about it by retweeting announcements – a good way to encourage online community!

Crowd Vote of the Week

World Oceans Day is on June 8. To raise awareness about protecting and restoring the health of the ocean, the One World One Ocean Campaign is hosting a video contest, but voting for the winning video ends today. If you love the ocean, go over and take a look at one of the seven finalists.

Enjoy your weekend!

Photo by Icelight (Flickr CC)

Here are our favorite posts this week about associations, innovation, governance and participatory culture.

What to Do When the Leaders Don’t “Get It” (Jamie Notter)

Notter’s advice will help any of you who have sighed or groaned in response to disappointing leadership reactions to new ideas. He says, “Don’t let cluelessness be your excuse for inaction. Each one of us is the hero in this journey, and working through (and maybe around) cluelessness is part of what we signed up for.”

No One Likes to Be Changed (Harvard Business Review, Daniel Markovitz)

“Telling leaders they need to change their culture is usually a risky proposition,” Notter also says in his post. Markovitz would agree: “The fact is, no one likes to be changed, even if the change is ultimately beneficial.” He wants to get rid of the idea of “change management” entirely. He says:

“A far more effective approach would be to actually involve workers in solving business problems. As Dan Pink writes in his book Drive, the autonomy and skill development that comes with solving problems for oneself will do more to overcome resistance and motivate change than any strategy a cloistered HR professional or consultant can develop.”

From Formal Strategic Planning to Strategic, Improvisatory Thinking (The Demand Perspective, Anna Caraveli)

The world around us has changed and continues to change, but the way organizational planning still relies on methods developed back in the early 1900s. How often do you find yourself charged with carrying out a strategic plan directive that will no longer have a high level of relevance once it’s operational? Caraveli says there’s a “need for strategic thinking capabilities rather than strategic planning processes.” She provides tips for replacing strategic planning with strategic thinking so you can create “new and unique solutions in an environment of change and unpredictability.”

Why Your Company Should Use the Kickstarter Model to Innovate (Harvard Business Review, Michael Schrage)

“The Kickstarter model should be a part of the innovation infrastructure of every global enterprise that takes intrapreneurial creativity and coherent corporate culture seriously,” says Schrage. He points to two organizational roadblocks to innovation: “silo-ization” of initiatives and a reliance on budgets rather than discretionary funds. I don’t think nonprofit employees are in the position to fund innovation out of their own pocket, as he suggests, but his other ideas hit home.

Cool Client Idea of the Week

Our client, ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development), offers free (and frequent) webinars to members and non-members featuring experts in the field of education. Many associations wouldn’t offer anything like that for free to non-members, but I bet getting prospect contact information in their database and establishing a regular channel of communication helps ASCD convert those prospects to members.

Client Tweet of the Week

When your industry or profession is in the news (in a good way), have some fun with it. Cicada crostini, anyone?

Client Vote of the Week

Do you promote your elections on Twitter? How about your blog? The AAA does both. On their blog, they provide candidate statements and photos so members can get to know them better.

Looking for one more good read? Here’s what you missed in the Voting 2.0 world this week:

• In our record-attendance webinar, we shared voter mobilization tips from the Obama campaign team. 

Enjoy your weekend!

Photo by Mark F. Levisay (Flickr CC)

The Obama presidential campaign had a secret advisory group of 29 of the nation’s leading behavioral scientists to help them get out the vote.

Who’s going to help your association get out the vote? No worries, you have your own Dream Team — Votenet. We’re devoting time and resources to solving our community’s biggest election challenge – increasing voter turnout.

In a Votenet webinar today (our largest attendance ever), I shared several mobilization techniques used by the Obama campaign. Which stimuli motivate people to vote? Obama’s team relied on behavioral science research to develop their get-out-the-vote tactics, and you can do the same.

The 7 Secret P’s of Obama’s Success

1. Personal

Personal contact from people whom voters know and trust, like a conversational, unscripted phone call from a neighbor, friend or colleague, works better than generic methods, like celebrity robo-calls. Personalization also works. The most opened email of the entire Obama campaign began with “Hey, <first name>.”

Personalize your election messaging. Ask members to encourage their friends to vote. Use video to make face-to-face personal appeals from member leaders.

2. Promises and Predictions

Commitments are socially binding because no one wants to break a promise. The Obama team leveraged this social norm with their Pledge to Vote cards.

Mail a pledge card or email the link to an online pledge form where people can publically pledge to vote. Make it socially sharable. After voting online, bring voters to a post-voting landing page where they can pledge to spread the word and encourage others to participate.

3. Plans

In field experiments, when voters were asked questions about their plans to vote (how, when, where), they were more likely to vote.

One way to guide your members through a visualization of their plan to vote is to send them a poll about their voting plans. Ask questions about the method they’ll use to vote (online, paper), when they’ll vote and where they will be when they vote. They will begin to formulate their own plan while answering your questions.

4. Pressure from You

An Election Day reminder increased voter turnout by 5%. That’s easy. Even better, when voters are asked if they plan to vote and a follow up is made with them during the election period, they were twice as likely to vote.

Remind members of their pledge to vote. When voters know you’ll be tracking who’s voted and who hasn’t, they feel the pressure to conform to social norms. It may sound a bit too “big brother” but it works. Once again, you can do it in the guise of a poll: “We’d like to follow up with you after voting to ask a few questions about your online experience.”

5. Past

People like to conform to social norms specifically if it relates to actions in their own past. Get their commitment to vote by reminding them: “We know you’ve voted in the past.” or “We know you haven’t voted, but we’d really like you to.”

Spur this motivation along by publicly displaying the names of those who have participated in past elections – “the good citizens.”

6. People Persuasion

Positive messaging encourages people to join the crowd, especially those who haven’t been active in the past.

Tell voters, “We expect high voter turnout.” Show what’s happening by displaying voter turnout percentages or tallies during the election period. Send out “Look who’s already voted” emails targeted by region or other membership segment. Include a few photos and names of those who voted, if possible. If you’re worried about anonymity, let voters check a box giving you permission to share the fact that they voted.

7. Peer Pressure

Personal appeals from peers work best because social accountability has a huge impact – a 9% increase in one field experiment. The effect is increased when peers know whether you voted or not.

Make peer pressure easy. Set up a post-voting “email a friend” or “spread the word” landing page. Provide email templates for personal get-out-the vote messages. Help them hold each other accountable by creating voting teams of two or three members – a buddy system to encourage each other to vote.

Bonus tip: Don’t trust your gut.

The Obama team learned early on that their conventional political wisdom and assumptions about voter mobilization were worthless. Instead, they relied on science to get the results they sought. Follow their lead. Commit to trying one new tactic based on behavioral science – experiment, measure and improve.

We’ll continue to research and share with you what we learn about the science of voter mobilization so you can increase your voter turnout.

Photo by Cave Canem (Flickr CC)