AIGA Get out the vote 2016
CHAPTER TOOLKIT + POSTER CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE
During the Spring of 2016, I was asked to join AIGA's Design For Democracy initiative's 2016 GOTV committee tasked to promote the national poster campaign / Google Art project and to create a toolkit to help engage and empower chapters to get out the vote in their own communities. Our audiences included AIGA chapter leaders, AIGA members, and the broader community. Our main goal: to increase chapter participation in our 2016 campaign. Our secondary goal: extending participation beyond the presidential election in 2016 and reestablishing Design for Democracy as a mobilizing factor in growing better citizen engagement overall.
MAIN responsibilities
Because of my experience with the National Leadership Retreat, I was also tasked with helping to reveal the toolkit to chapter leaders at the national gathering of leaders in Raleigh during the retreat in June 2016, as well as to raise excitement and awareness around the poster campaign. At each leadership retreat, every chapter leader is inundated with information around every initiative from Women Lead to Design for Good to Diversity + Inclusion. Our committee's goal was to invite the interest of chapter leaders in our initiative and successfully encourage them to bring our goals to their local chapter boards and communities.
THE individual ROLE I CARVED OUT
My experience with previous toolkits as a chapter leader helped me empathize with chapter programming leads: what were the barriers to the standard PDF toolkit? how do I easily find ideas relevant to my chapter makeup and size? how do I easily find programming that works with our resources? I proposed and created an online toolkit / catalog organized to offer programming based on chapter size, location and resources available.
MAIN OBJECTIVES
The main objective of the AIGA Get Out the Vote campaign was to engage chapters and their communities in the poster campaign by programming local events throughout the year organized by AIGA chapters and student groups across the country in partnership with League of Women Voters affiliates and other local partners, by building and presenting an online gallery of original, nonpartisan posters for printing and public distribution, and by organizing exhibitions in conjunction with the Republican National Convention (Cleveland, July 18-21, 2016), Democratic National Convention (Philadelphia, July 25–28, 2016), and AIGA Design Conference (Las Vegas, October 17–19, 2016).
I designed / architected the online toolkit using a Wordpress template and the elements established by the creative team commissioned by AIGA HQ. The content populated into the site was sourced from committee leads and leadership submissions for AIGA Design for Democracy programming. Submissions were structured around chapter size and ability, resources, timing and potential impact. The toolkit followed the brand established by Christine Wisnieski.
Above: Results from the poster campaign; my submission for the campaign. Selected posters were exhibited on the online gallery as well as in 3 national exhibits: RNC, DNC and the AIGA National Conference in 2016, as well as exhibits / events organized by local chapters. To see more results form the 2016 activation check out the impact report here.
Overall, 30 chapters hosted 50+ GOTV events to reach 15,000 members in less than a year.
Learn more about our impact by downloading the impact report.
The 2016 AIGA Get Out the Vote committee members included Karen Kurycki, Lee Zelenak, Antionette Carroll and Jennifer Visocky OGrady (national board lead).