Bite The Ballot (BTB) held the UK’s second annual National Voter Registration Day. During the week of 2-8 February 2015, our work contributed to the registration of 441,696 people to vote – a world record (per capita) and deemed ‘the most successful drive’ of any Western democracy.*
READ IT! @TheiPaper: 'Who're you calling apathetic? ½ million people sign up to #vote' http://t.co/kQgq6Qv2oS #NVRD pic.twitter.com/mPovuYjF8b
— Bite The Ballot (@BiteTheBallot) February 16, 2015
01. The Brief
Colehouse was hired to lead social media, partner and press communications: working with community partners, key commercial partners, national press, and political partners to coordinate digital communications to register a minimum of 250,000 people to vote.
02. Approach
On the evening of 4 February, #NVRD was beamed on to the UK Parliament’s Elizabeth Tower (Big Ben). This was the starting gun that kicked off a nationwide day of action.
Media Partnerships
Some of the largest digital companies in the world backed NVRD in various ways from modifying their platform to supporting us spreading the message.
Google added a link to the homepage of google.co.uk, made posts and tweets about the day on social media. Facebook created a button that was “served to all adults in the UK” prompting them to register to vote. Twitter not only let us hold our war room at their London head quarters but supported us with the promoted trend for the day, tweeted about us and even mentioned us in their blog!
Just, you know, a call to #RegisterToVote on the @GoogleUK homepage. No biggie. #NVRD http://t.co/JXJqjQJql1 pic.twitter.com/vAOG00in3h
— Bite The Ballot (@BiteTheBallot) February 5, 2015
Content to Inspire, Educate and Create Action
We created 100’s of pieces of digital content that were distributed to millions of people across social channels.
We used quotes, cultural references, statistics and cold hard facts to inspire, educate and motivate people to create action; below are some of the fantastic examples:
Enough said: #RegisterToVote #NVRD http://t.co/EWcASs0Sit pic.twitter.com/6lTfwJjCj3
— Bite The Ballot (@BiteTheBallot) February 5, 2015
49% of 16-17 year old suffer from Electile Dysfunction. Don't suffer in silence this #NVRD #RegisterToVote pic.twitter.com/NcF5YIIUmP
— Bite The Ballot (@BiteTheBallot) February 5, 2015
03. Results
The level of social media interaction we experienced was unprecedented. It showed a true desire for change and engagement in the political process. Although we were the promoted trend for the day (#RegisterToVote) by 9 am on the morning of NVRD we also managed to hold 4 out of 10 trends on Twitter. Showing just how widespread the conversation was about registering to vote. Throughout the day we shared inspirational, education and fun content that helped drive 1000’s of people to the .Gov site to get registered.
- 14.4 million digital impressions were created solely from the Bite The Ballot social media accounts
- Overall in 7 days we registered 441,500 people.
- Registering 166,167 during National Voter Registration Day alone.
- You can see from the data above that at it’s peak on National Voter Registration day we there were over 8000 people registering during one snapshot of the day.
- 80% of people were accessing the online registration portal via mobile.
- NVRD and it’s variations trended nationally, and organically 4 separate times throughout the day of 5th Feb.
