Dear MoveOn member,
Here's an awful secret: Only 20% of the people who get this email will ever open it. (You're one of them, so congratulations and thanks!)
But if this were a text message, 90% of people would have read it within five minutes.1
This inspired the MoveOn Mobile Team to develop an entirely new approach to get out the vote. Our goal? Texting a reminder to vote to tens of millions of registered Democrats in the country in the next 10 days.
And not with just a generic text, but with a personalized message sent directly from a MoveOn volunteer, not a machine.
That's a lot of texts! Achieving this ambitious goal means paying for all the lists of registered Democrats, training thousands of MoveOn members on how to use cutting-edge peer-to-peer texting tools we've developed, making sure that this innovative tool can scale to this massive and ambitious level, and increasing our staff capacity to run trainings and crunch the data.
We still need to raise $75,000 to fully fund our voter-to-voter "Text Every Dem" program in the last 10 days before Election Day. Can you chip in $5?
Yes, I'll pitch in so we can text tens of millions of Democrats with a reminder to vote.
This is the first time that MoveOn has tried anything like this. We've never even had the lists of all the registered Democrats in the country, because they were too expensive. But a partnership with other progressive organizations helped us get access to the national voter file, and now we need to do everything we can. We can't bear another election night like 2016.
With the "Text Every Dem" program, MoveOn members will be able to personally reach voters who miss emails, use caller ID to avoid phone calls, and aren't home to answer a knock on the door when our massive volunteer-powered canvassing program comes knocking.
Already, 500,000 people have pledged to vote when reached via this text program. But we still have more than 20 million more texts to send! And so we need your help.
Text messages are the perfect way to reach record numbers of people, particularly young people, who overwhelmingly oppose Donald Trump, but rarely vote in midterm elections—and who use their mobile phones at a higher rate than the general population.2
And with a huge number of volunteers who have signed up and are ready to go, MoveOn has a huge, last-minute opportunity to send 20 million get-out-the-vote text messages in the final 10 days of this election—and not just any text messages, but individual, personalized text messages, with authentic, sincere, unscripted videos about why this election matters.
We're borrowing the videos for our person-to-person text messages from MoveOn's breakthrough "Real Voter Voices" program. MoveOn's been honing this program since 2017, tested it through five special and primary elections so far, and time after time, it's helped get out the vote.
The Real Voter Voices program is primarily run via online ads, but thanks to the huge influx of volunteers, we have a chance to expand it in the final days with peer-to-peer texting—and reach tens of millions of people!
And we know that these videos work incredibly well via online ads. According to independent analysts:
- These videos added thousands of votes for Ralph Northam in Virginia.
- They added thousands of votes in December's razor-tight special election in Alabama—making a huge difference in the final vote count between Doug Jones and Roy Moore.
- And in the case of Conor Lamb, who won a narrow victory in a special election in the heart of Pennsylvania Trump country, these videos were one of the decisive factors!
In fact, when we pay to run these videos in ads, they are FIVE TIMES MORE COST-EFFECTIVE than other paid methods.
We know that text messages are read. Text messages have open rates 36 times greater than email and double the response rate of phone calls.3 So we know that our text program is tremendously powerful, but just last week, our system crashed—due to the amazing outpouring of volunteers! We've had to purchase last-minute server space and dedicate additional technical staff to keep this program running through November 6.
If "Text Every Dem" succeeds in 2018, we'll be ready to double down on the approach for 2020, when we'll be up against an even steeper mountain of right-wing campaign cash. But right now, in this crucial midterm election, our system is stretched to its limits.
Will you invest $5 to keep the MoveOn text message system running and make sure that our groundbreaking program can help get out the vote in 10 days and lay the groundwork for shattering engagement in the elections that come after?
Thanks for all you do.
–Mark, Shari, Erik, Shaka, and the rest of the MoveOn Mobile Team
Sources:
1. "Campaigns Enter Texting Era With a Plea: Will U Vote 4 Me?" The New York Times, August 1, 2018
https://act.moveon.org/go/54895?t=5&akid=219324%2E10220574%2Ex_1MDJ
2. "Young Voters Might Actually Show Up At The Polls This Year," FiveThirtyEight, October 16, 2018
https://act.moveon.org/go/54897?t=7&akid=219324%2E10220574%2Ex_1MDJ
3. "Campaigns Enter Texting Era With a Plea: Will U Vote 4 Me?" The New York Times, August 1, 2018
https://act.moveon.org/go/54895?t=9&akid=219324%2E10220574%2Ex_1MDJ
PAID FOR BY MOVEON
This email was sent to Eddie Alfaro on October 26th, 2018. To change your email address or update your contact info, click here. To remove yourself from this list, click here.
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