Friends Don’t Let Friends Skip Elections

You might be surprised to learn that talking to your friends and family about voting is the best way to make a big impact on this election. Our nonpartisan peer-to-peer turnout initiative, Voter to Voter, gives you tools and resources you need to start the conversation.

We’re hosting a handful of events this month to help you get ready for the election. Find the full list of events or check out our Voter to Voter effort!

Find an Event Voter to Voter

Only 10% of registered Kansas voters actually vote in every election. Are your friends and family in that group?!

How It Works

Peer Pressure with a Purpose

Voter to Voter launched in 2018 with the belief that democracy works better when we ALL participate. Rooted in the power of relationships, Voter to Voter asks volunteers to talk to their people about voting – then gives them the tools to do so effectively!

That’s right, no postcards or calls to strangers. Just conversations with your friends…and it’s working! We’re talking to more than 30,000 voters statewide, and better yet, the voters we connect with turnout at a rate 25% higher than the statewide average.

What You’re In For

Being an Ambassador

Create a team (or join an existing one) on Voter to Voter! See a list of our teams here.

Choose 10 friends to help vote & add them to your Voter to Voter list.

Help each friend create a voting plan and reach out to them with election reminders (we’ll help!)

Celebrate your progress in the Voter to Voter tool, which shows you once a friend has voted!

Why it Works

Relational Organizing 101

The research is on our side.

Your social circle has a lot of influence. If your friends are digging a particular workout/podcast/vacation spot, chances are you’re more likely to be into those same things, or at least willing to try them. The same is true for voting. Research shows that relational organizing is 10x more effective than door to door campaigns.

The best messenger is . . . you!

Phone banking is effective on people who are already voting. But if anyone is going to get your nonvoting friend to the polls, it’s you! It makes sense: doing new stuff is hard. But it is sooo much easier if someone you trust has your back. We talk a lot in political organizing about the “trusted messenger,” which is just a fancy term for YOU.

It’s efficient and easy.

Voter to Voter doesn’t require cold calls or talking to strangers. It asks you to talk to people you already know and love about voting. Now, it’s not quite as easy as just tagging your friends on Facebook – but that doesn’t work to get people out to vote – but its pretty dang close! And, it works. If you want to impact the upcoming elections, Voter to Voter is likely the most effective use of your time. Our volunteers are getting tons of nonvoters to the polls with only an hour of work a week. Remember, we just want you to lighten the load for some of your friends, hopefully ones you like talking to! We send you all of the nonpartisan, up to date election info you need, are on call for questions, and can even provide you scripts to get started.

You can cut through the noise.

You’re not average. If you’re this deep in our website, we might even call you a political nerd and maybe you even like all this hubbub that comes with election season. Regular voters, however, do not. They’re annoyed, confused, and their brains are sapped by all the other BS life has thrown at them. It’s your job to make it easy on them. Tell them exactly where to find info on candidates and help them make the (surprisingly tough) decision about when and where to vote. Person to person contact is really the thing that you can’t buy. It’s the thing that you have to organize. And it’s the thing that makes the biggest difference.

Access the same data used by campaigns for free!

The biggest predictor of whether people vote or not is whether somebody reaches out to them before an election. However, campaigns typically only reach out to voters they know are going to show up to the polls. So your friends who aren’t frequent voters are probably not hearing about the election from anyone besides you! Whether you vote or not (but not who you vote for!!!) is public data. Campaigns use the data to target voters, but accessing the data is expensive and difficult for the average person.

We built the Voter to Voter tool to level the playing field. Community members and organizations should be able to mobilize their networks with the same powerful data used by campaigns. The fact that we give it away for free is not just awesome, it’s unprecedented.

It’s flexible.

You can make a huge impact from this election from home! All we ask is you connect with 10 people that you choose about the election. We’ll let you know the hard deadlines, but otherwise you can do this when and how is best for you. Always message one friend on Instagram, hit them up there and help them make a voting plan. Call your mom weekly? Ask her what her plan is to vote. You can do this on the phone, via text, over email – however you normally connect with your friends and family. We’ll get the news out to you about what to do and how to vote most effectively, and you’ll tell your people. We’re like a statewide phone tree!

Really, really (really) effective.

Remember in the first point, where I mentioned that peer-to-peer organizing is 10x more effective than traditional tactics? Our Voter to Voter Ambassadors have blown that out of the water since we launched this project in 2018. That year we saw 82% turnout among the voters we talked to, compared to 56% statewide. More impressively, the unlikely voters turned out at nearly 75%, compared to 33% statewide. Stunning.