Voting is one of the most sacred duties of American citizens, and the outcomes of elections shape our nation’s policy, and have effects around the world. But as the voting landscape changed drastically between the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 midterms, our entire organization dedicated itself to one goal: helping Americans cast their ballots.
Plan Your Vote was an ambitious undertaking that spanned several arms across not just NBC News Digital but all of Comcast NBCUniversal. The project aimed to give busy voters every bit of information they needed to register to vote, cast their ballot and make sure it counted.
The main hub of Plan Your Vote was a website that provided voters in every state with the specific information necessary to cast their ballots, from registration deadlines to voting day requirements to the status of mail-in-voting. The page included changes to state voting rules and requirements since the 2020 election as well as separate sections for primary and general elections.
The site was available in English and Spanish. Plan Your Vote included links to relevant state and local voting agencies so that readers could take action. Readers could sign up for email reminders for when their state’s election day arrived.
Plan Your Vote debuted in March 2022, in time for the primaries, and continued to be updated with real-time information through general election day. The site was supported by a multiplatform marketing campaign the entire time, amplified across the platforms of all of Comcast NBCUniversal.
National Voter Registration Day on September 20 was leveraged as a key moment to once again ‘flood the zone’ – our campaign was already established for 6 months at that point, allowing us to speak to Americans from a strong position and really own the moment. On this day, we debuted new campaign creative that featured talent from across the NBCU family – everyone from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to Bravo’s Andy Cohen – sharing their plans to vote and highlighting the key features of the digital tool. This approach allowed us to reach various niche audiences with a crucial, timely reminder.
We also used this day as a key moment to engage with Comcast and NBCU’s nearly 200,000 employees. We crafted marketing assets specifically for internal use across email, building signage, and town hall touchpoints that used the line “your elected officials are scheduled for a performance review,” connecting election day to a corporate America tradition.
Plan Your Vote picked up more than 750,000 visits between March and November 2020, with noticeable spikes in visits during the September-November general election season. More than 2,200 people signed up for Plan Your Vote email alerts in English and Spanish.
