This year, our letter-writing campaigns in California, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania were designed from the start to help us measure their impact. Vote Forward has an in-house data and research team whose full time job is to study campaigns, run strategic experiments, and answer a simple but important question:
“Did this actually increase voter turnout?”
To do that, we use one of the most rigorous tools available in social science: randomized controlled trials (RCTs). In a RCT, we compare turnout between two groups of voters who are alike in every meaningful way, except that one group receives Vote Forward letters and the other does not.
Both the California Prop 50 letter campaign and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court letter campaign were structured as RCTs, which means we’ll be able to directly measure the impact of the letters the Vote Forward community sent using publicly available voter turnout data. It takes state and data vendors a few months after an election to finalize and release this information, so right now, we’re eagerly waiting for that data to arrive.
Once it does, here’s what’ll happen next:
- Our team will match the turnout data with our internal records, carefully clean and validate everything, and then run statistical models to estimate exactly how much our letters increased turnout in each campaign.
- We’ll also generate a confidence interval, which helps us understand how precise that estimate is and how confident we can be that the results reflect real impact rather than random chance.
- And once that work is complete, we’ll share the results with you. Whether the findings are big, small, or somewhere in between, we’re committed to being transparent about what we learn—because that’s how we build smarter, stronger programs over time.
In addition to these RCTs, 2025 was also a year of pilot experiments. We tested two entirely new ideas:
- Distributing flyers across neighborhoods and farmer’s markets in California, exploring ways of bringing Vote Forward’s personalized letter approach into public spaces.
- Inviting voters to call or text directly in response to receiving a letter—opening new doors to two-way engagement between voters and volunteers.
Pilots like these are important for testing concepts—helping us understand what’s doable, what voters respond to, and how new approaches work in the real world. By trying out these novel program ideas, we’ll learn valuable lessons that will shape future campaigns.
And as we look ahead to 2026, we know that engaging voters early and earning their trust will be just as important.
