2020 Highlights

The 2020 election was historic in so many ways, and staff and volunteers with The Outreach Team played an enormous role. We could not have done it without our amazing clients, partners and vendors, so thank you so much for all you have done to make our work possible.

Here’s what we did by the numbers:

We had a presence in thirteen key states
At our peak, we had over 5,500 canvassers in the field, organizers on the ground, and callers on the phones.
We helped 67,602 people register to vote
We made 8,056,734 phone calls and sent out 2,314,729 texts
We sent out 21,510 canvass shifts. During those canvass shifts, we knocked on 1,585,708 doors.
We collected 316,972 petition signatures to qualify two ballot initiatives (Measure 109 and Measure 110) in Oregon that passed.
We recruited 4,400 unique volunteers to take action on a campaign.
We performed quality control on 534,436 voter registration forms from dozens of different local and statewide organizations.
All told, we had conversations with 886,586 people about the 2020 election.

Here are a few key states where The Outreach Team played an especially large role:

Wisconsin

Voter registrations collected: 30,211

Voters contacted: 174,909

In the Spring, we launched a massive voter registration drive in Wisconsin. The state has added more and more barriers to registering to vote over the last 10 years, making it a particularly challenging place to do voter registration. Add in a pandemic and we had our work cut out for us. None of that slowed down our organizers - led by Project Directors Bethany Bauck and Adam Rothschild, we put on our PPE and set up shop outside grocery stores and other busy areas, helping over 30,000 people - mostly from communities of color - register to vote or update their registration.

Canvasser Rhonda Willette invites someone to register to vote in Milwaukee.

After the voter registration deadline, The Outreach Team launched 10 voter contact offices across the state with Family Friendly Action Fund and For Our Future PAC. State Director Margaret Howe led the way as we knocked on doors from Eau Claire to Green Bay to Beloit, and everywhere in between. All told, we visited 442,986 doors in Wisconsin and spoke to 172,613 voters at their door.

We also started an organizing program a year ahead of the election with Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin. Led by Project Director Haylee Becker, a team of organizers hit the ground early on, organizing vote coalitions on college campuses, planning a summit, and recruiting and training a team of interns to organize their community around reproductive rights. The team also used their platform to support Black leaders in mobilizing their communities for racial justice, including running ads on social media, creating a statewide reproductive justice action council, and supporting a #BlackHealthMatters week of action.

In July, Project Director Juana Silverio launched an organizing effort with Win Justice Wisconsin, a coalition effort between SEIU, Color of Change, Planned Parenthood Votes and Voces de La Frontera Action to mobilize 37,000 Black and Latinx irregular voters in Wisconsin to vote. With 22 organizers and 810 completed volunteer shifts, Team Win Justice made 448,885 dials and spoke to 25,893 Wisconsinites.

Meanwhile, the QC Team was hard at work making sure WI voter registration applications were valid and complete. Led by Project Director Vashti Selix, the team of over 200 remote callers did visual and phone reviews of 51,413 voter registration forms from organizations across the state, and gave those organizations feedback based on the results. And we made 222,152 calls to Wisconsin voters to remind them to register and make sure they had a plan to vote.

Pennsylvania

Calls made: 803,851

Voters contacted: 205,700

In Pennsylvania, our voter contact offices knocked on over 400,000 doors across the state in the last four weeks of the election alone, on behalf of For Our Future PAC and the Democratic National Committee.

Adam Assaad with The Outreach Team’s For Our Future PAC Pittsburgh office heads to the next door

Ashley Caldwell also led a voter registration project with Everytown for Gun Safety, building teams of canvassers to help college students register to vote. The canvassers registered a few thousand students predominantly across three campuses: in Pittsburgh they concentrated efforts on registering students at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon campus and in State College they worked to register students at Penn State.

A team of canvassers with our Students Demand Action project prepare to talk to Penn State students about registering to vote

Georgia

Voter registration forms collected: 8,479

Voters contacted: 43,456

A canvasser with The Outreach Team’s New Georgia Project Atlanta office walks someone through the voter registration form from a safe distance

In August we hit the streets to help register Black and brown voters ahead of the state’s early October voter registration deadline. We quickly launched four offices in Atlanta, Savannah, Athens, and Augusta, and registered nearly 8,500 voters in the span of several weeks.

After the registration deadline we partnered with the New Georgia Project Action Fund to turn out voters across the state. Led by Bethany Bauck, we knocked on over 150,000 doors for NGP and spoke with more than 37,000 voters.

We also partnered with Vote Tripling Action Fund on an exciting new model of polling place canvassing in Atlanta. For several days at the end of the state’s early voting period and again on Election Day, our staff posted up outside heavily Democratic polling locations around Atlanta metro to talk to voters who had just cast their ballots and ask them to text three of their friends on the spot to encourage them to vote as well. Led by Taelor Lewis, our staff got over 15,000 of the highest-propensity voters possible to send more than 40,000 texts to friends and relatives to get out the vote!

Arizona

Voters contacted by our organizers, volunteers, and callers: 21,543

In Arizona our #Fight4HER team had a great year advocating for global reproductive rights. Together our team overcame the obstacle of going completely digital in March 2020 and was still able to recruit 262 unique volunteers and collect 3,688 petitions on behalf of Population Connection Action Fund. The fall was even more exciting as our team of over 100 GOTV volunteers contacted 2,400 voters.

We also had organizer Neha Khurana working on behalf of EDF Action and the Green Wave coalition in 2020 in Flagstaff, AZ. Starting in the summer, Neha worked to recruit and train climate activists in Arizona’s first congressional district. In just two months, she generated over 600 new C4 members for EDF Action and graduated 12 “Climate Team” leaders from our Summer Activist Training Program. Neha became an integral part of the team bringing attention to the need for climate action in AZ.

Meanwhile, after doing QC reviews on 51,413 voter registration forms from AZ, the QC team launched a GOTV call program into AZ that resulted in 763,895 phone calls going out to new registrants. Our callers not only helped voters make a plan to turn in their ballots, we also educated voters about Proposition 208, a statewide public education funding initiative that ultimately passed!

Oregon

We qualified measures IP 34 and IP 44 for the ballot, and the ballot measures were approved by Oregon voters in November 2020! Oregon is now the first state in the country to decriminalize drugs and invest in treatment, instead of prison. They are also the first state to decriminalize psilocybin for therapeutic use. These measures will make thousands of people’s lives safer and better. Moreover, the Secretary of State’s office let us know that our signatures had some of the highest validity rates they had seen. Not only did we qualify these initiatives in a pandemic, but we drove quality the whole time.

North Carolina and Maine

Kristin Jackson and Marika Bresler led nearly 60 organizers with Planned Parenthood Votes who built volunteer teams to organize their friends and communities to contact voters and get commitments for requesting absentee ballots, committing to vote for pro-choice candidates, and committing to vote on Election Day. We recruited thousands of volunteers who will continue to be involved as activists helping Planned Parenthood affiliates in Maine and North Carolina win battles at the state level.

In addition, the QC team worked with leading organizations in NC - groups like NC League of Conservation Voters, North Carolina A. Phillip Randolph Institute, North Carolina Asian Americans Together - to help them strengthen their voter registration programs. In a state where partisan attacks against voter registration groups are frequent and damaging, these organizations will continue to organize their communities and build power for years to come.

The Brooklyn QC office (before COVID made our offices remote) celebrating 200,000 QC calls

In the fall, Ashley Caldwell and Ilysia Shattuck led the way to opening eight voter contact offices in North Carolina and Maine, knocking on over 450,000 doors in those two states combined.

The Outreach Team canvassers with Students Demand Action were also in the mix, helping students register to vote at college campuses across the Triangle, in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. During their final week they also expanded to schools in Greensboro, North Carolina.