Tech for Campaigns was born out of its founders’ concerns that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory was partly due to his social media strategy. But an important group OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters and former Meta senior executives Past donors argue that targeting unregistered voters will be key to defending the Democratic majority on Capitol Hill.
“Close races are determined by voter turnout,” Jessica Alter, co-founder of Tech for Campaigns, said in an interview. She says, “We all do things like send out mail and knock on doors, but we know it takes a different approach to get different results.”
The new push comes at a politically dangerous time for Democrats, with President Biden trailing in the polls. Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to convince people to vote by mail even as President Trump questions the voting process.
catch up
Stories summarized to help you stay up to date quickly
“In a state as close as Wisconsin, sporadic voters are the whole game,” said Josh Henderson, senior director of paid media at A Better Wisconsin Together Political Fund, which works with Tech for Campaigns.
He added that registering a new voter is “usually cheaper” than influencing someone’s vote.
Tech founders Alter, Peter Kazanjy and Ian Ferguson started the group after the 2016 presidential election. Entrepreneurs angry about Trump’s victory sent Google documents to their friends asking if they would be willing to lend their expertise rather than money to help Democrats win the election. Hundreds said yes.
“We brought the mindset of a tech entrepreneur to this,” Alter said. “We wanted to actually try to find some solutions rather than just sit around and complain and yell at people who already agree with us on social media.”
The group participated in more than a dozen campaigns in Virginia in 2017. For the 2024 cycle, the group is helping campaigns in eight states, where it hopes to flip or defend congressional-level majorities for Democrats, and is targeting flips in five red states. For the next 10 years.
Backers argue that the group’s main value is helping campaigns use data-tested digital marketing strategies at a time when the political world lags corporate America in marketing strategies. According to a report from Tech for Campaigns, 2022 campaigns allocate about 28% of their advertising budgets to digital advertising, while commercial advertisers allocate 72% of their spending to digital.
Rob Goldman, a former Facebook advertising executive and financial backer of Tech for Campaigns, said that when he spoke to candidates and political operatives in 2019, they described old-fashioned messaging strategies that focused on messages rather than specific results.
Political experts have told him, “If we tell voters about this position, they’ll change their minds about candidate Y,” Goldman said. “That might be true. That might not be true. It’s hard to know if your ad can change people’s minds. Nothing is as simple as whether someone requested a ballot. Yes or no?”
Since 2020, Tech for Campaigns has tested more than 500 different messages across the country. Ads often encourage users to visit websites that guide them through their state’s voter registration process. The advertising campaign encouraged more than 500,000 people to vote by mail, and those who registered were twice as likely to be under 35, non-white, or female. According to the group, a quarter of them do not have cell phones in their official voter files.
They also recruited micro-influencers to post videos that the organization paid them to promote on social media to users who lean Democratic and might not vote. In 2023, the group found that in Wisconsin Supreme Court races, influencer ads generated 3.4 times higher engagement rates than regular ads and a 25% increase in sign-ups from people of color.
This year, the group plans to test whether disclosing whether artificial intelligence helped design an ad affects its effectiveness and how it can be used to answer questions from voters.
The results of these experiments could help Tech for Campaigns tackle its next big test this summer: getting people to the polls.
“One of the biggest reasons people don’t vote, and it’s not really the biggest reason, is that it’s too difficult,” Alter said. “Let them vote.”
