In 2021 Vera Creative was hired by the non-profit organization CHANGE Illinois to help end gerrymandering and fight voter suppression in Chicago. The goal was to engage residents throughout the city to help define fair voting districts to restore equitable political representation for the people and by the people. We got the word out about the proposed independent ward map from the Chicago Advisory Redistricting Commission (CARC). Their independent ward map, dubbed The People’s Map, was drawn with the guidance of experts and prioritized keeping communities together while honoring 2020 Census data and the input from 525 public testimonials over the course of 41 public and transparent commission meetings.
In “America’s most corrupt city” we rose to the challenge of taking on politicians who have benefitted from gerrymandering to shed light on the closed-door backroom map-drawing process to bring an end to corrupt ward maps in Chicago. In the process, we activated Chicacagoans to support The People’s Map. Support from Chicagoans was critical because how their wards are drawn determined both the strength of their vote and the allocation of the resources they’d access for the next decade.
Our team leveraged social media to facilitate a growing interest in Chicago around redistricting reform. Upon establishing the brand identity for the campaign, we took a human-centered design approach to develop the messaging for the campaign. Our outreach team and social monitoring team provided first-hand qualitative insight to inform the key messaging points that we developed.
Initially, our focus was to elevate the fair and independent nature of The People’s Map in contrast to the existing ward map. We set out to go beyond educating the public to make people care enough to play an active role in shaping how their districts were shaped. We also worked to develop credibility around this movement, both in sharing emphasizing the credibility of the commission who drew the map, and to amplify the support from the nation’s top experts on redistricting and gerrymandering. We knew The People’s Map best promoted fairness, equity, and representation, but it was another thing to make people care enough to contact their representatives who had a vested interest not to support our map in order to maintain power and political control.
We carried out a hyper-targeted social ad strategy that prioritized the 10 wards where alderpersons were more likely to support our map. We tested our audiences, refined them to re-prioritize neighborhoods more primed to take action, and ultimately expanded upon an audience sub-set to reach residents across the 50 total wards of Chicago.
As the campaign continued, the Latino Caucus along with some others proposed the “Coalition Map” that was drawn without public input that had many key political supporters. We were then required to shift our focus in differentiating the existing ward map to the proposed Coalition Map. We accomplished this through explainer posts, footage from news appearances by client stakeholders, side-by-side map comparisons, and attempts to visualize gerrymandering with straightforward graphics.
Shortly after, the Rules Committee Map was introduced by the City Council as the map unofficially tied to the interests of the Black Caucus. While aldermen escalated the remap turfwar, we reinforced the focus on restoring power to the people, and encouraged voters to take action to choose their representatives — not letting their representatives choose them.
We emphasized the key benefits around equity and voter empowerment, informed audiences of the ways The People’s Map would result in day-to-day improvements of Chicagoans lives, and cut through the noise around racial establishment politics by focusing on social proof that amplified the desire of the people who spoke out for an end to corrupt ward maps.
The impact of our efforts extended beyond vanity metrics. We helped start a conversation and facilitated conversations across the city that got people talking about redistricting reform in Chicago. Systemic revolution is a gradual process, but thanks in part to our efforts during this social campaign we were able to create a groundswell of pressure on elected officials to invite the people to be a part of Chicago’s redistricting process.
We drove over 10K website visits for Chicagoans to take action in their support of The People’s Map.
Our ability to hyper-target audiences in priority zip codes to stir up action in neighborhoods that had the most to gain, increased direct engagement among alderpersons who were willing to listen to their constituents.
Within the scope of this submission, we procured 37,000 engagements and just over 1-million impressions.
On Twitter, we helped secure over 500,000 organic impressions because of our engagement with local reporters, activists, redistricting experts, and local politicians.
Due largely to our efforts via social media, we were able to facilitate over 300 letters sent to alderpersons, 2,300 petition signatures, and 157 total official public testimonies submitted during the City Council hearings on redistricting.
The campaign is currently still active, but we’re working toward the hope of Chicago’s voters being able to choose their ward map for the first time in thirty years. Ideally, this time with more transparency.
