For the past 12 years, I’ve spent a ton of time thinking about how to get people to open the messages I send them. I’ve spent more nights than I like to admit considering various combinations of subject lines and senders.
But all of us open the personal letters we get in the mail. That’s part of why I’m fascinated by The Big Send.
It’s an experiment led by a coalition of progressive groups — from Swing Left to Indivisible to the People for the American Way — aimed at sending 10 million handwritten, personal notes to voters in communities who are typically underrepresented in the electorate.
It’s informed by research from the Alabama special election in 2017 won by Doug Jones. An activist named Scott Forman sat at his kitchen table and wrote letters for 1,000 voters in the state. He then compared the turnout from his recipients with 6,000 other Alabama voters. If you received one of Forman’s letters, you were three points more likely to cast a ballot.
Once he saw the impact of that campaign, he started an organization called Vote Forward to take the effort countrywide. Subsequent testing in special elections shows that letter writing might do more to boost turnout than a whole range of traditional organizing tactics, including door knocking.
Part of why this works is that the cost of entry is low.
You need to pledge to write and send just five letters to voters to be part of the official program. You’ll also have to supply your own stamps.
And as a collective campaign, this couldn’t feel better timed.
Before the pandemic, Vote Forward’s ambitions for 2020 were more modest. But today, activist groups are filled with communities of supporters who are sitting at home looking for meaningful things to do — ways to make a difference in the middle of a quarantine.
And they’re currently seeing hundreds of sign-ups each day (which translates into thousands of new letters).
I signed up to send letters to voters in North Carolina, my home state, this past weekend. If you want to join me, go to: https://votefwd.org/bigsend.