CALIFORNIA SECRETARY OF STATE:
Vote Safe California

Collaborate Inc. leveraged their community relations expertise to proactively engage diverse and hard-to-reach communities across the Vote Safe campaign’s priority counties throughout the state in the lead up to the 2021 gubernatorial recall election. Our experience forging authentic partnerships with trusted community partners with credibility, serving hard-to-reach communities, allowed the team to quickly kick-off the elements of this integrated campaign in record time without skipping a beat. Our overall approach focused on in-community (grassroots) to grow the visibility of the Vote Safe campaign, promote voter education, and ultimately voter participation through statewide voter turnout in the gubernatorial recall election. The following snapshot illustrates the team’s collective outcomes as a result of our timely implementation efforts. 

To kick off our Community Outreach efforts, our team established a thorough process for vetting and enlisting reputable community-based organizations (CBOs) to apply for grants to support the communications outreach goals of the Vote Safe campaign. In doing so, our team contacted nearly 100 CBO’s across the state, ultimately securing participation of 80 of these groups (listed below) - including both 24 larger/more prominent CBO Ambassadors and 56 more localized Micro-Grant Awardees, with a total grant amount of $1,057,200. It should also be noted that in the course of our outreach efforts to potential CBO partners, our team sought to include organizations across a wide swath of constituencies so as to maintain the integrity of this non-partisan campaign.

Relative to process, our team created a required online application for potential CBO partners to complete. The application included several important data points, including among other elements:

  • Contact information and a primary contact

  • Constituent reach and demographic information

  • Earned media and communications capabilities, including media contacts

  • Tactics used to reach constituents (apart from the Vote Safe campaign)

  • Which, if any, Voters Choice Act (VCA) counties their work touches

  • A detailed Vote Safe campaign-specific work plan

Following receipt of the applications, our team created a detailed budget that included recommended funding levels for each CBO Ambassador and Micro-Grant Awardee based on individual assessments of organizational capabilities, voter reach, and submitted work plans. Following budget approval, our team of liaisons informed those all awardees of their grant award - and those that were not approved - and notified them of next steps, which included the completion of key forms/documents we created to crystalize their participation, including: 

  • CBO Agreements (signed by CBO and Secretary of State designees)

  • Vendor Payment Forms

  • Weekly Reporting Templates 

Next - and in under two weeks - we fully onboarded each set of participating CBO’s by assigning one of our CBO liaisons to each and conducting onboarding calls that focused on goals, expectations, and reporting/accountability, including reinforcement of the required actions for which they were accountable based on funding levels and as laid out in their respective CBO agreements: 

  • An overview of our earned media strategy

  • Use of Vote Safe California Branding

  • Weekly reporting requirements

Highlights of the weekly reported actions submitted by our CBO Ambassadors and Micro-Grant Awardees include:

  • Anti-Recidivism Coalition: Distributed the toolkit via daily posts on social media channels, reaching 3,762 people on Facebook and Instagram and garnering 2,069 impressions on Twitter

  • Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities: Emailed 85 member institutions announcing the partnership and requesting their participation, with a link to the toolkit and requesting the number of physical materials needed by each institution.

  • BizFed Institute: Emailed 5,800 direct contacts and earned 2,500 social media impressions.

  • California Forward: Election week social media efforts reached nearly 4K on Instagram, 300 on Facebook, 12K on Twitter, and 3K on Linkedin in over 15 posts. A blog post highlighting voting information was distributed to 25K people across California via their newsletter. Also hosted a live town hall on Instagram that engaged 63 people live with a recording to a potential audience of 4K people.

  • Council on American Islamic Relations: Organized a phone bank that reached 271 people in total and geared toward not only voter education but ensuring individuals had vote plans.

  • California Hispanic Chambers of Commerce: Deployed social media and email blasts to 37,000+ contacts and held regional meetings with 100+ chambers/associations.

  • Equality California Institute: Contacted 44,168 LGBTQ+ and allied voters (ages 18-33) via text message campaign (for a total of 49,168 voters since launch) with a 12% reply rate.

  • Hmong Innovating Politics: Organized community days in Sacramento and Fresno - these are in-person events with community members. They tabled and provided in-language support on the special election.

  • MOMS Orange County: Distributed Vote Safe collateral materials at our booth at the Festival of Children at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, CA.

  • St. Anne’s Family Services: Coordinated live event passing out flyers in English and Spanish scheduled for today, reaching approximately 75 clients in Early Childhood Education and Supportive Housing