CASE STUDY
New Era Colorado is a Colorado-based organization that fights to give young people a greater voice in politics by driving voter turnout and helping pass state bills to increase voter access, reform student loan policies, and increase access to reproductive care.
BACKGROUND
In the 2024 election, New Era was focused on increasing young voter turnout, supporting progressive ballot measures, and promoting their voter guide. They also launched an independent expenditure called Young People for All People that endorsed several candidates they identified as youth agenda champions. In addition to their thorough field campaign, they wanted to launch a major digital advertising campaign, but lacked internal capacity to realize their vision.
CHALLENGES
The electoral advertising space is oversaturated. For several months leading up to every presidential election, the public is inundated with non-stop election messaging that often feels cynical and impersonal
Voters in Colorado faced an exceptionally long ballot and the amount of information they were taking in quickly became overwhelming
New Era Colorado didn’t know how to directly reach the youth population they needed to realize their vision
HOW WE HELPED
We worked with New Era to develop a comprehensive plan to accomplish their electoral goals, including strategizing on compelling multimedia assets and a wide-ranging social marketing campaign across several strategic channels to help them reach their target audience.
STRATEGIC MESSAGING AND ASSETS
We developed a series of audio, image, and video ads that were highly tailored to the audiences with which New Era has spent years developing authentic relationships and trust. In contrast to the negative and fear-based messaging that is common in elections, these ads incorporated messaging designed to feel empowering and exciting.
A key message was the idea that “young people will be a force for change this election.”
SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN
We broadcasted this message across the channels that this core audience of young people spends the most time—Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, and Hulu. Further, our targeting ensured that only values-aligned young people received this turnout pressure, which helped achieve higher impact for the budget.
CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
We were able to turn the other major challenge of this campaign—the fact that voters were overwhelmed by a long ballot—into an advantage for New Era. The volume and complexity of the ballot measures ensured that there was a huge audience of young people who were actively seeking additional information to simplify the voting process. Since the most common tool for research for most young people is Google, promoting New Era’s voter guide with Google Search ads connected us to a massive audience of high propensity voters in a non-intrusive channel.
Video that was distributed across social channels during campaign
RESULTS
2.17 MILLION
impressions across all social media channels
26k
unique visitors to New Era Colorado’s voter guide