RISE: College Student Organizing

College Student Organizing During the Coronavirus: Strategies from Rise

College students and young voters are poised to play a decisive role in 2020 elections. That’s why BallotReady and Rise partnered to develop new strategies for peer-to-peer organizing to offer young voters comprehensive information about candidates up and down the ballot. We recently sat down with Max Lubin, CEO of Rise, to talk about Rise's success so far organizing college students in 2020, and his recommended digital organizing strategies shifting priorities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Part 1: Rise’s Mission & Outcomes in the Michigan and California 2020 primaries

The mission:

How did Rise, a nonprofit focused on college affordability and student organizing, adapt to help young voters cast an informed vote during the pandemic?

The challenge:

When we talked with Max Lubin, CEO of Rise, he made us realize students are struggling with more than how to cast a ballot. “As many as 45% of all college students are food-insecure,” he shared. “And that was before the pandemic. Now, many students aren’t eligible or don’t have access to the benefits of the CARES Act either.” Campaigns and nonprofits often expect students to jump into unpaid volunteer roles, but that’s just not realistic when students’ basic needs are not being met.

In addition to leading policy advocacy work, Rise students also set up the Student Navigator Network to provide one-on-one case management to help students apply for benefits and connect with resources. This allowed Rise to offer students support on an ongoing basis while continuing to organize to get out the vote.

From work on past elections, Rise determined that one of the most common reasons college students don’t vote is because they don’t have sufficient information. Chronic underinvestment in youth vote programs—both from candidates and colleges themselves—has left students with relatively little information about voting compared to groups of voters who are considered “easier to turn out.” Rise saw a clear need to close that gap by making candidates' background and platform information, as well as polling information, more available and accessible to students.

The solution:

Backed by BallotReady’s Turnout Engine, Rise is leading large-scale relational organizing programs to guide students through every aspect of getting ready to vote, from checking a registration to making a plan to learning about the candidates (in-person before the pandemic, and online after). In this program, every student organizer is only responsible for mobilizing their closest 50 friends, classmates, and peers to vote. Through BallotReady and Rise’s Rise.Vote election center, Rise will reach more than 85,000 college student voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by November.

Analyzing TargetSmart data from more than 10,000 student voters Rise reached recently, here is what we have learned so far about the voters using Rise.Vote:

Young voters are rising: the median age of a Rise voter is 21 years old and the modal age is 19 years old
Battleground states are fired up: more than 90 percent of Rise voters are in battleground districts or states with closely decided elections
Rise voters are new: 82 percent of Rise voters are first time voters or infrequent voters
Rise voters are racially diverse: Voter data on race is unreliable, but Rise voters are significantly more racially diverse than the overall electorate
Young women are leading the way: More than 60 percent of Rise voters are young women (exceeding the ~57% of college students who are women)

With these promising results in hand, we asked Rise to share some of their best practices on organizing during the pandemic.

Rise Student Organizers, 2018

Part 2: Digital Organizing on campuses in light of COVID-19 (Rise’s best tips)

One fallacy in digital organizing is that there is a silver bullet digital technology tool or strategy that can provide all-encompassing solutions to increase turnout. This couldn’t be further from the truth according to Max Lubin. In reality, finding the best digital tech tools is only the starting point. The currency of good organizing is relationship-building. Digital technology just offers a platform for making those connections possible.

The more campaigns utilize certain technology or tactics, typically the less effective those tactics become over time. That’s why, for example, many campaigns have seen perpetually shrinking contact rates during phone banking. At the outset of the pandemic, Rise sought to learn from the best online organizers in the field such as Stefan Smith who pioneered “Digital Doorknocking” for Mayor Pete’s presidential campaign. Those learnings informed Rise’s current approach to relational organizing using the Rise.Vote election center as a hub for operations.

Drawing from past successes turning out student voters through digital organizing on campuses, Rise recommends three important strategies for digital organizers to adapt in light of COVID-19.

1. Translate Core Organizing Principles into a Digital Setting

Train students on the fundamental principles of organizing and work with them to adapt these core principles to a digital setting.
- Create opportunities to not only digitally organize, but also help develop shareable content to provide such as voting guides.
- Translate the elements of face-to-face organizing into a digital format (i.e. make conversations as personal as possible).
- Rise created Slack channels to engage and challenge student organizers— using BallotReady links with custom UTM codes to create a competition to recruit the most volunteers to join the digital organizing.
Prioritize skill-building over statistics: incentivize students based on their commitment to organizing principles, not just paying them for the number of votes or registers.
Narrow the focus of volunteers to mobilize their closest 50-100 friends or peers. This ultimately requires building much more capacity, but leverages the power of closer relational ties than broadcast tactics and is especially important with campuses closed during the pandemic.

2. Embrace and Support Student-Led Approaches to Digital Organizing

Students know their communities best. They know what will resonate with their peers and motivate them to vote.
When trained as organizers and welcomed into a supportive online community, students can adapt core principles in innovative ways that embrace their digital competencies and build upon trusted student-to-student relationships.
Rise, for example, awards student grants to launch unique GOTV programs on campuses. The goal is to encourage ongoing innovation among college student communities for get out the vote tactics. This also requires “flexible” capital where an organization can develop more innovative approaches by embracing the learning that comes from failure or suboptimal outcomes.

3. Restructure volunteer organizing to prioritize proximate relationships → Get more volunteers who work with a smaller group of their peers

In traditional election cycles prior to COVID-19, you could hire a limited number of organizers to work long hours and seek to turn out thousands of voters by canvassing heavily trafficked parts of campus like a cafeteria or student center.
This speaks to a larger overall strategy of tracking variables to measure the success of digital organizing campaigns.
COVID-19 presents unprecedented challenges that cannot always be anticipated. So it is important to have mechanisms in place to evaluate success and then adjust methods accordingly when something is not working out.
It may be necessary to deviate from traditional organizing norms or practices. Embracing a willingness for creative problem solving is key to reach new levels with digital organizing strategies in upcoming elections.

Part 3: Rise & BallotReady looking ahead

Looking to the future, Rise is leading the way to make sure students can safely vote in November. Registering voters and helping young people to stay informed about voting will have the most important influence in managing the virus in 2021 and beyond and helping young people recover from the devastating effects of the pandemic.

“Coronavirus affects all of our daily lives,” said Lubin. “And affordable higher education and COVID-19 are intertwined. Over the long haul, getting out the vote to elect responsible leaders is one of the most important things we can do to help our country recover from the virus. Helping college students make sure they’re registered and ready to vote, and mail their ballot from home is vital for a strong democracy.” Today, BallotReady is developing a tool and researching how to best cater to vote-by-mail policies throughout the United States.

What else does the future hold for Rise and BallotReady? “Mobilized communities,” Lubin says. “And we’re eager to see what new things we can try for the November 2020 election. We may not know yet where students will be physically in November 2020, but we’re preparing for the shift to vote-by-mail with BallotReady’s nationwide coverage. We see BallotReady as a true partner beyond a typical vendor relationship.”