Success Story

Mobilizing Young Voters in NYC

During the 2022 midterm elections, the City of New York set an ambitious goal to turn out record numbers of young and low-turnout voters. DSPolitical partnered with FENTON and The New York City Campaign Finance Board – the city’s independent agency charged with spreading voting information – to mobilize these voters through a cross-channel media and messaging program. And thanks to our offline experiment with BlueLabs Analytics, we were able to quantify the digital ads program’s unprecedented treatment effect of +1.6pp overall and 2.8pp among voters under 30.

With only 4 weeks in the country’s most competitive media market, mobilizing these voters would require reaching as many of them as possible at a persuasive frequency wherever they were online. DSPolitical’s data, onboarding, and buying tools are designed to do exactly that:

    • Our programmatic, addressable media kept a persuasively high frequency among our treatment universe, delivering over $0.50 per voter per week adddressably, compared to $0.07 on zip-targeted media.
    • We maximized reach among our treatment targets by limiting our list of targets to those who we have pre-matched to one of our data onboarders, ensuring that our reachable universe matched our intent-to-treat universe.
  • We encouraged a consistently high frequency by cutting our experiment universe with Catalist’s Digital News Swimlanes model, reaching our audience equally regardless of media consumption behavior.
  • We efficiently matched a larger portion of our treatment universe through a combination of Geofusion – our award-winning location-based targeting – and excluding multi-family residences. This let us target voters with an additional identifier (lat-longs) without substantial waste.

These measures not only helped CFB hit their goal of mobilizing young and low-turnout voters, but led to some of the highest detected mobilization effects from a paid digital program:

  • Turnout increase among voters under age 30: +2.8pp (p=0.06)
  • Turnout increase among voters who didn’t vote in 2018: +2.2pp (p=0.09)
  • Turnout increase among voters with HHI $30k-75k: +2.6pp (p=0.08)
  • Full treatment universe turnout increase: +1.6pp (p=0.07)

Even in the most challenging environments, DSPolitical has the tools to execute and measure the most successful political ads programs.  Through the dozens of experiments we have run over the past decade, we’ve refined the best practices for running an effective media program – and we bring them to every campaign we run.

 

 

Interested in learning more about this campaign? Download our webinar, Digital Targeting to Increase Voter Participation in NYC.