Hawkfish and Progress Georgia partnered to execute a social media campaign to motivate Black and people of color in Georgia to vote in the Senate runoff elections. In a saturated ad ecosystem, with voter turnout tending to be significantly lower in off-cycle elections, our program focused on breaking through the noise with organic content that would be relatable to our Georgia audience.
Hawkfish and Main Street One collaborated with more than 120 social media influencers, more than 80% of whom were Black and people of color and more than 90% were residents of Georgia, to reach their followers with over 190 unique pieces of user generated content. The strategy relied on authentic, local messengers to engage and educate users through influencers’ personal testimony and inspirational messages.
Our strategy was to lift up local, diverse voices to share their personal stories and testimonies of why their state Senate representation is important to them with their followers and other Georgians through both organic and paid media. We intentionally kept the ask of creators broad so that the user generated content felt authentic and true to the influencers’ experiences and hopes for the election outcome, without partisanship.
Posts used images, carousels, and video to direct voters to election information, highlight key dates, and hype the importance of voting. Top-engaging posts were boosted through paid media for further reach and mobilization on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, and optimized by age, race, and gender. Captions and ad copy were tailored to drive urgency and voter education.
Our distributed social approach in the Georgia race took reach and engagement to the next level by coordinating networks, digital creators, and others to expand audiences and drive messages. This decentralized messaging infrastructure enabled us to amplify reach, and opened up space to build trusted messengers through authenticity. We showed how distributed social is growing in importance as candidates, causes and brands look for ways to break through in a crowded digital ecosystem.
Our efforts resulted in one of the largest micro-influencer campaigns in Georgia political history, ultimately contributing significantly to the Senate victories by Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock. Through our approach, we reached nearly 1.9 million followers on organic social with over 190 unique pieces of content and reached over 2.5 million Georgians through paid media with over 50 unique ads in just three weeks leading up to Election Day. Organic social yielded a remarkable engagement rate of over 10%, performing 5.5x the benchmark for political content. Paid media also drove strong engagement with an efficient CPE of $1.40. 98% of comments were positive sentiment.
