By The NextGen Distributed Team — Lillie Catlin, Marlou Taenzer, Sofia Garduno, Shasun Sulur, Lindsey Rayner, Eric Babb, and Autumn Frlekin

In 2020, NextGen America’s Distributed Organizing team of 75 volunteer leaders, over 5,000 volunteers, seven staff, and 13 fellows made 2,161,820 calls and sent 11,405,115 texts to young voters in priority battleground states. We accomplished this voter engagement while also creating and maintaining a positive community experience for our volunteers. …

By Sofia Garduno and Shasun Sulur

Historically, distributed phonebanking programs aren’t considered as scalable as texting programs. However, our NextGen Distributed Organizing team found a way to successfully integrate a calling program into our distributed strategy. Organizing remotely during a pandemic is hard not just for organizing staff, but for volunteers too. Here is what we learned from our calling program that can and should be replicated in future voter contact programs — pandemic or not.

With the help of five paid fellows and 32 volunteer leaders, we executed a program that made over two million voter contact calls in…

By NextGen America

To close out Black History Month 2021 on a high note, NextGen America is recognizing 30 young Black changemakers who are making history right now. These young political figures, community organizers, and activists are helping shape political discourse around the country and transform the way we see the world.

By Laura Flores

In addition to our main organizing and voter contact programs, we wanted to test out new and interesting tactics for the final stretch of the 2020 cycle. Here’s what we learned, and why it matters:

Tactic 1: Online Communities

What is it: NextGen is always looking to meet young voters where they are at. One thing we know for sure is that 18–35-year-olds are very online. Most people are a part of one or multiple online communities, even if they don’t view it that way. An online community could be a university class Facebook page, your neighborhood…

By LaMar Thompson-Hightower

How we created unique, engaging content that helped us reach new audiences and pull young people into the political process.

Social media during COVID-19, civil rights protests, and the 2020 election pushed our team to be more compassionate, creative, and strategic than ever before. Our team’s social media program consisted of three priority platforms — Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter — and three additional platforms — TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn. In 2020, we’ve seen significant increases in audience growth and engagement across all platforms; most notably, we grew our Instagram following ~82%.

Our social media team consisted of three full-time staff members. Laura Flores (Social Media Manager), Safa Eltaib (Social Media Associate), and LaMar Thompson-Hightower (Social Media Associate)…

By Michael Saoma and Ahmad Ali-Ahmad

The new new media: you can run an influencer program (and should)

NextGen recruited 869 influencers in battleground states to encourage their combined following of 63M+ people to vote, and vote for Democrats. The program was built from scratch in-house, the content was unscripted, and the results were weird and beautiful. Here’s how we did it, and why you can too.

The case for influencer programs:

For progressive digital organizers and advertisers this cycle, things were… challenging. …

By Ben Wessel, Executive Director, NextGen America

Every election brings with it questions about young voter turnout: namely, will they or won’t they? Headlines about “lazy” and “apathetic” Gen Z’ers and millennials are par for the course in political commentary.

In 2020, uncertainty over youth turnout was even more rampant than usual. The coronavirus pandemic shut down tried and true methods of voter engagement, like clipboarding for voter registrations on campuses and canvassing in neighborhoods. What’s more, after a historically diverse Democratic primary, we entered the general election with a Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, who had a dismal -22 favorability…

by NextGen America Executive Director, Ben Wessel

Check out this bonkers stat from a precinct at the University of Central Florida in Orlando:

Though we aren’t getting the overall results we want in Florida, this is a bright sign for the enthusiasm of young voters. It seems that every registered voter who lives in the precinct showed up to vote, and then new folks who moved into the precinct changed their address at the polls. NextGen Florida has been instrumental to the work at UCF: We made 1,377 calls and sent 2,258 texts to people who live in this precinct…