Created for Change

Strategy & Concept

Social Campaign

UX & Design

Voting has never been this easy.

Challenge

Did you know that roughly 43% of all eligible U.S. voters didn’t cast their ballot in the 2016 elections?! That’s nearly 100 million people! And of that 100 million, too many were Millennials. This year, in the middle of a raging Pandemic, we knew that number could only dwindle. As creatives with the skills to not only design but also build tools that can create meaningful change and radically transform the way people experience the world, we felt that it was our responsibility to find a way to empower young people to vote safely from home. Voting by mail isn’t something new, but it is something that’s extremely difficult to understand. The rules and restrictions vary not only by state but also by county, making it too onerous a task for anyone nonpartisan organization to undertake.

Our Solution

So we put our heads down, stripped away the confusion surrounding voting by mail, and literally scoured every single city, county, and state’s local election offices to understand their individual rules (4,013 to be exact). Then, we built a tool that housed all of that data in one place. But as UX experts, we knew that simply building a tool with that information was not enough. We needed to make it beautiful, easy to access, and a breeze to understand. And so PracticeSafeVoting.org was born.

Knowledge labs

Product Design, Strategy, User Experience

Industry

Technology

1. Enter your state and region. 2. Request your ballot and wait for it to be mailed to you. 3. Recieve it, vote, and mail it to your loca

Strategy & Concept

Our idea not only encouraged people to use their voice, but it also gave them the tools to do so, safely from the comfort of their homes in the middle of a Pandemic.

The innovation was in the creation of our behind-the-scenes tool, which gathered and organized over 4,000 pieces of information regarding the upcoming election and each U.S. county’s rules and regulations, providing eligible voters located anywhere in the country with the information and tools they needed to vote by mail. This huge undertaking was manual and cumbersome for the small team of humans behind the idea, but so very worthy of the cause.

Long lines at polls during the 2020 election.

Social Campaign

To inspire young people to use our site we knew we had to do something that no one else was doing. We had to relate to them. And what better way to do so than through a playful Instagram campaign that combined vibrant illustrations with popular slang. Through design and copy, we harnessed the power of humor to bring light to a serious issue--helping Americans understand their right to vote-by-mail, and their individual power to enact real change.

To further spread the word, we engaged Instagram’s creative community, asking like-minded brands, young activists, and designers to share the campaign with their followers. The results exceeded our wildest dreams.

Practice Safe voting mailbox with letter inside

UX & Design

Our new tool lived on a beautiful site that invited registered voters to get their vote on in a few easy steps. Users simply needed to select their state and region, and our site would either connect them with their local gov sites or would provide easy-to-follow instructions, depending on their county’s process. In some states like California, residents saw a message that their ballots were already being mailed to them. In others, residents had to mail in a request to a specified address, which we also provided. Cognizant of heightened sensitivity around data privacy, we also added in a layer of security and refrained from collecting any personal user data helping people feel safe from the get-go.