2021 Highlights

We wanted to take a moment to share some of our proudest moments from 2021. Our incredible team of staff and volunteers were in the middle of some of the toughest fights, from voting rights to climate change and everything in between. Here are some of the highlights:

Statewide Elections in Virginia

We knew Virginia’s statewide and legislative elections were going to be highly competitive last year, and we had a client in Freedom Virginia that understood the importance of getting on the ground early. We launched a fact-finding canvass in three critical corners of the commonwealth in June, talking to voters about the economy and health care to get an early read on the sentiments of the electorate. We built the program out further in the fall when we switched to targeted get-out-the-vote efforts. By the time the polls closed we had knocked on over 170,000 doors and had 40,000 conversations with Virginians.

Voting Rights with Our Voice Our Vote and Common Cause

We launched our Common Cause project in April 2021, with a focus of building support for the For the People Act, and later shifted that focus to the Freedom to Vote and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. At the start of our campaign we prioritized senators from four key states including Arizona, Alaska, Georgia and Maine. Our team of organizers joined democracy reform coalitions in states where they already existed and built new relationships with in-state organizations who shared similar priorities around passing the For the People Act and ending the filibuster. We grew our footprint in June, expanding to include New Hampshire and Nevada. Some of our greatest successes were grasstops sign-on letters– as a team we collected 833 signatures, which significantly over-performed our goal of 600. Other great successes included many strong events that mobilized over 2,000 activists over the course of the year and attracted 35 media hits.

We also ran a voting rights program in Arizona with Our Voice Our Vote and Voting Rights Lab. We blew our campaign goals out of the water, and while we were not able to stop the passage of SB1485, we were able to force a quicker vote and raise the visibility and salience of the issue with voters while building out a substantial infrastructure of activated voters and supporters in target districts to roll into this year’s election season. Read more about our voting rights work in Arizona here.

Climate Action with Environmental Defense Fund Action and Green New Deal Network

2021 was a huge year for climate and environmental organizing, with special focus on the Build Back Better Act.

We organized communities on behalf of Environmental Defense Fund Action to stop climate change last year. With organizers based in Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, and Georgia,we held 1,912 one-on-one meetings, and recruited 4,270 people to attend one of our 921 events across those 8 states. We also made 3,779 calls to Member of Congress offices, and had 129 constituent meetings in target states and districts.

Our Green New Deal project included six organizers working in five locations; Arizona, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Miami and Sarasota, Florida. Our organizers worked with existing in-state partners, built new relationships with advocacy groups, recruited volunteers and mobilized activists to weekly rallies outside of their target’s offices to fight for the passage of Build Back Better and bold climate action. Our team raised visible grassroots support in each of their communities through weekly petitioning, social media actions and weekly rallies. In three short months,our team recruited 511 activists to weekly rallies outside of congressional targets’ offices and collected over 4,600 signatures from supporters to help identify activists and build partners’ lists in each state.

Collecting Public Comments to Save CA Solar

In late summer and fall of 2021, we ran a campaign on behalf of the Solar Rights Alliance to stop the CA public utilities commission from critically wounding the state’s solar program through a proposed annual fee on solar consumers. Our goal was to collect 25,000 signatures to pressure both the commission and the Governor to reject this policy change. We blew past our goals, ultimately resetting our target at 38,000 signatures. We wound up delivering just north of 41,000 signatures after exceeding our goals for collection rates, contact information from supporters, and phone and text opt-ins. All told, we engaged more than 23,000 people who the Alliance could then movement-build around through subsequent outreach and follow-up, including nearly 2,000 identified volunteers to build out further campaign elements and visibility.

Quality Control with State Voices

In 2021, our Quality Control team audited over 25,000 voter registration forms for grassroots organizations across the country, including Real Women Radio, The First Coast Leadership Foundation, Florida Immigrant Coalition, Florida Rising, State Voices Florida, Blueprint NC, NC Asian Americans Together, Unifour One, North Carolina A. Philip Randolph Institute, NC League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, One Arizona, AZ AANHPI for Equity, PoderLatinX, Corazon, Arizona Coalition for Change (AZC4C), Mi Familia Vota (MFV), Make the Road Pennsylvania, One PA, and PA Voice. The quality control work we did behind the scenes was a key part of making these voter registration drives happen, by identifying ways to make the voter registration work more effective and protecting partners from potential attacks. Read more about our Quality Control program here. 

Wave

We launched a new brand to house our face-to-face fundraising work. Check us out!

Other Projects

Here are a few smaller (but mighty!) projects we worked on this year:

WorkMoney

In late 2021, we launched and ran a pilot calling program to contact WorkMoney members to help folks who are struggling financially to navigate government services and connect them to resources that can help them pay rent, make car payments, secure their stimulus payments, access healthcare, and more. In just over one month, we called 50,000 members and contacted 2,700 of them. Our callers successfully completed 1,271 nearly-40-question surveys with in-depth and personal questions about members’ financial lives. This project was exciting for us because our callers were able to serve in a social work type role for folks who can benefit from government services while also proving that a non-electoral calling program can successfully reach an organizations’ uncontacted membership base. 

Voter Contact with Conservation Voters of PA

Last fall we partnered with Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania to run an innovative campaign to talk with 2020 ticket splitters - voters who had voted Democratic at the Presidential level but supported Republican candidates down ballot, particularly at the statewide level. This campaign was a downpayment on several crucial statewide races on tap for this year; we surveyed these voters for their opinions on the most important issues facing the commonwealth, while raising CVPA’s profile and centering the environment with these crucial swing voters through conversations at the door. Our 10,000-knock pilot program would end up speaking with 1,700 voters to collect anecdotes and voter sentiment along with critical early-cycle data. Programs like this provide an invaluable head start in building out a voter contact program, as they get canvassers on the ground early, build capacity, and plant the seeds for later targeting and messaging efforts.

Call Program with Florida Rising

The Florida Rising calling program was an exciting opportunity to run another remote voter contact calling program. New Florida Vision hired us for a month-long paid calling program to turn out voters in several Florida municipal races, including Miami, Orlando, and St. Petersburg. We were contracted to make 129,651 calls and speak with 8,761 people, but over the last half of October and the first week of November, our team of Florida-based callers crushed those goals. We generated huge efficiency with an autodialer and ultimately made more than 750,000 calls and spoke to nearly 15,000 voters - more than double our initial goal. Our team was proud that the data gathered reflected the election results, and we also collected valuable information about which issues are most important to Florida voters to help begin shaping 2022 messaging.

Thanks to our clients, staff, volunteers, and friends who helped make all this work happen.

Onwards to 2022!