During the 2024 primary season, eleven exceptional teams of artistic activists are coming together to develop and implement big, bold ideas for how to address the greatest challenges our country and its democracy face:
How do we increase excitement in civic participation?
How do we increase access to civic participation?
How do we increase safety in civic participation?
Each of the following teams have four weeks, $4000, and endless mentorship and support from the Center for Artistic Activism’s experts to conduct experiments and learn all they can.
The Experiments
Canvasser Waze
How can we help local organizers report safety concerns so that their canvassers can conduct voter outreach without threat or fear?
Team: Maria Javier, Jeanine Abrams McLean, and Cate Mayer of Public Wise, Fair Count, and Be. The. Ones. | Locations: Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi
Convention ALL
Can we increase the diversity of Travis County (where Austin is located)’s party conventions? And if we do, does it lead to political parties and platforms that are more representative?
Team: Becky Bullard and Andrew Dinwiddie of Democrasexy with Deeds Not Words and MOVE Texas | Location: Texas
Delivering Democracy
Can a cardboard mailbox bring hope in 2024? It did in 2020; how can we support voting by mail in the face of today’s skepticism and attacks?
Team: L.M. Bogad | Location: Pennsylvania
The Future of South Carolina
Can collective visioning make people more invested in the civic participation that can make that desired future a reality?
Team: Cate Mayer of Be. The. Ones. | Location: South Carolina
Glow in the Dark Voting Stations
What happens when voter engagement moves from over a table into a multi-modal artistic installation?
Team: Carlitos Díaz of QLatinx with additional local organizations | Location: Florida
Local Democracy Challenge
How can we encourage the soon-to-be electorate to engage with their local government?
Team: Alexandra Leal Silva of Common Cause California | Location: California
Music: the Motivoter
Does adding music to voter communication increase its impact?
Team: Nate Dewart of Songs For Good with Fair Count | Location: Georgia
Oops! All Donuts!
Can comedy be used as a vehicle not only to educate about elections but also increase election excitement?
Team: Mark Kendall of CoolCoolCool Productions | Location: Georgia
Pop Up Culture Shop
How can creative communities be mobilized to increase local voter participation?
Team: Jessica Tully and Alejandra G Ramirez of Center for Cultural Power with Gregory Sale of Arizona State University | Location: Arizona
Save Our Progress
Can gaming influencers be turned into voting champions? Can fan activism extend to video game fandoms?
Team: Sara Mortensen and Angela Eng of Fandom Forward | Location: Online
Voting is Mutual Aid
Can voting be rebranded as mutual aid? What happens when voting is presented in this way and included as part of mutual aid events?
Team: Aileen Loy | Location: Georgia
EXPERIMENT RESULTS
Key takeaways emerged across experiments, including:
lead with sincerity and comedy
People had a lot of success being real about how hard things feel right now –and then countering the negativity with humor and joy.
Make Outreach as individual as possible
The 1:1 conversation really does work best. As much as possible, try to engage people individually for maximum impact.
use trojan horses
Lots of groups led projects focused on broad appeal: bar hangs, face painting, mutual aid, comedy shows. Once they had hooked their audience, it was easy to bring up voting and get people to commit to civic participation, whereas leading with voting would likely have driven people away or turned them off.
make it all super easy
This is pretty obvious, but it came up again and again. Anything that can be done to make the ask easier makes it much more likely to get people to take action. For example, people had success when they created templates so anyone could easily join an action, or gave any amount of money to someone being part of an event.
And, crucially: people do want to help
This was a great counter to the narrative that most Americans are tuning out. So many groups found that people want to get involved — they just need to be asked, and it helps if the ask already plays to their strengths and interests.
More about all of these takeaways will be shared in Summer 2024 — stay tuned!
Why Experiment?
For a corporate perspective (whose takeaways we can certainly apply to our own work):
“If testing is so valuable, why don’t companies do it more? After examining this question for several years, I can tell you that the central reason is culture. As companies try to scale up their online experimentation capacity, they often find that the obstacles are not tools and technology but shared behaviors, beliefs, and values. For every experiment that succeeds, nearly 10 don’t—and in the eyes of many organizations that emphasize efficiency, predictability, and “winning,” those failures are wasteful.
“To successfully innovate, companies need to make experimentation an integral part of everyday life—even when budgets are tight. That means creating an environment where employees’ curiosity is nurtured, data trumps opinion, anyone (not just people in R&D) can conduct or commission a test, all experiments are done ethically, and managers embrace a new model of leadership.” Read more here.
For a human rights perspective (that reclaims innovation from the private sector):
“There is near-consensus among human rights practitioners that the field faces, if not a crisis, a daunting array of complex challenges. For the majority of the world that lacks significant economic and political power, there is an urgent need to diversify our tools and increase our capacity to innovate as quickly as the powerful do. To meet this need, some human rights advocates have embraced design thinking and the innovation lab model as a way to shake free of old patterns and identify promising, if sometimes crazy, ideas.” Read more here.