Statistically speaking, driving youth voter turnout is a big, big challenge. Over the course of our nation’s history, turnout among the 18-29 age range peaked in 2008, during Barack Obama’s historic presidential run, at just under 50%. But beyond that single race, the percentage of eligible youth voters that actually cast a vote ranges between upper teens, for midterm election years, to upper thirties for general election races that include the race for the Oval Office.
What resulted from our collaboration was a collection of guides that were shared widely across Instagram by passionate voters, aiding in conversations, and getting the youth vote out to the ballot box in an especially polarizing national race.
Tyler Kalogeros-Treschuk & Madeline Halperin-Robinson,
Statistically speaking, driving youth voter turnout is a big, big challenge. Over the course of our nation’s history, turnout among the 18-29 age range peaked in 2008, during Barack Obama’s historic presidential run, at just under 50%. But beyond that single race, the percentage of eligible youth voters that actually cast a vote ranges between upper teens, for midterm election years, to upper thirties for general election races that include the race for the Oval Office.
There are a million reasons why young voters don’t head to the polls, and the last thing they would respond to is another authority figure telling them why voting matters. They will, however, listen to each other.
There are passionate, active voters in their midst, and by connecting with them, we could educate and encourage them to speak up with their friends who say they won’t vote. So instead of looking at all of eligble Gen Z voters, we opted to focus on these passionate pollsters, turning them from voters to influencers in their peer groups.
Visually, we leveraged HeadCount’s primary typeface “Cactus Bold” with slight alterations to add interest and create a more unfinished, and organic look. The type treatment was combined with more playful, yet clean illustration. This established a visual style that could be modified based on the topic.
We focused on Instagram as our platform, as it skews towards a younger audience and created carousel images since they’re easy to share in Instagram stories. Frame by frame, these images provided a guide on how to talk to friends, what to say when they raised objections, and resources to help our new influencers, and their newly-educated friends.
After initial concepting, HeadCount saw that a blunt headline of “So your friends aren’t voting…” resonated better with our target audience, as did using photographs over illustrations.
What resulted from our collaboration was a collection of guides that were shared widely across Instagram by passionate voters, aiding in conversations, and getting the youth vote out to the ballot box in an especially polarizing national race.
