Greetings! 

It’s been a long while since we’ve written to all of you who have at some point signed up for and volunteered with Vote Forward. As we head into 2020, we wanted to share some highlights from the year and let you know what we're planning for the months ahead.

The short version is, although we've been quiet in communicating with this list, we accomplished a lot in 2019. We put Vote Forward on a firm footing as an organization, hiring our first full-time staff members and making some big improvements to the software. And most importantly, thanks to your extraordinary efforts, we facilitated another deluge of letters to voters. 

The result: we're now in a position to orchestrate our first giant letter-writing effort for 2020, launching next week. If you’ve written letters in the past, but it’s been a while, we'd love to see you get back to it. If you started the signup process but never completed it or were approved but never had a chance to get started, we hope to see you return as we ramp up for the year ahead. And if you have questions, we'll be here to help.  

Read on for details on all of this (and stay tuned for more details the first week of January), and thank you for your efforts and attention as always. We look forward to supporting you in all of your efforts for a healthier democracy in 2020.

🍾Happy New Year! 🥂

Scott & the Vote Forward team
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2019 Highlights

More Waves of Letters!

As of today, Vote Forward volunteers have written a total of 1,014,613 letters to voters in 2019, including 229,922 to Virginia. 103,131 of those letters to VA helped to boost turnout among minority voters in majority-minority counties, and 126,791 focused on the key swing districts that Democrats won to flip both chambers of the legislature. Overall, this is nearly as many letters as were sent in 2018, despite it being an off-year. We are deeply heartened to see so much enduring enthusiasm. 

Voter Registration Experiments

We've done a bunch of experiments using hand-written letters to register new voters, and we're seeing a steady stream of new voters registering as a result. Our first attempts encouraged online voter registration, with some success but not as high of a response as we hoped. Later in the year, we added a version with prepaid postage and pre-filled voter registration forms. The response rate here has been more than double what we saw for the first version, but we think there’s still room for improvement. This is a difficult challenge, but it will be extraordinarily valuable if we can crack the case. We'll continue to test new voter registration ideas in 2020. 

The Plan for 2020!

In the months ahead, we'll be continuing to test new designs and tactics for voter registration, under the banner of a new program we're calling “Vote Forward Labs.” The campaigns in this program will typically be smaller and have shorter timelines to complete, to maximize the pace of our learning. If you'd like to be in the loop on these experimental efforts, you can opt in here. 

Most importantly, based on the continued success of our "Please vote!" letters, we're planning to start writing and stockpiling "Please vote!" letters for 2020 in early January, in preparation for a massive letter deluge to be release on Tuesday, October 27th 2020. You'll be able to "adopt" low-propensity voters in 10 key states to prepare and stockpile letters imploring them to vote on November 3rd. It's a long time to hold on to them, but we have millions to prepare, so we want to get started early. At first, we will be targeting the registered voters who we think are least likely to move. We will also be periodically synchronizing these campaigns with the latest voter files, to ensure that we’re offering the best available set of addresses at all times. The first of these campaigns will go live next week, with about 2 million addresses available in 10 key states. A lot of work to do! But we're optimistic that we can get through all of these and more, with your help.