We launched Turn Up To Vote as an attempt to convince our audience that they should get involved in American civic life during this dismaying political season. By engaging millennials to sign up to vote and provide a tool that would raise awareness of political campaigns and developments in this election cycle, we wanted to fulfill our civil duty of making participation in our democracy as accessible as possible for a demographic that traditionally is not necessarily inclined to vote.
We partnered with TurboVote to provide a tool that would be both convenient and easy to use for our target audience to make our campaign as accessible as possible.
Our editorial staff produced 45 pieces of content around civic engagement and voter registration, and BuzzFeed Motion Picture produced 5 videos, including one that we produced with the White House, which featured President Obama trying out "5 Things That Are Harder To Do Than Registering To Vote." We pushed our civic and social engagement initiative across a number of social media platforms, including Facebook, Facebook Live, Twitter, Tumblr, Vine, Instagram, and our BuzzFeed community.
At our company headquarters, we hosted an internal sign-up event for BuzzFeed employees to sign up through TurboVote.
What was unique to our approach was that we used our position as a leader in the media industry to create content that would effectively reach our target audience of millennials, as well as appeal to traditional media including broadcast and print to reach a wider audience.
BuzzFeed had the most TurboVote signups ever for a single partner in less than a week! BuzzFeed's Turn Up To Vote initiative led to nearly 23,000 people completing the signup process, and nearly 150,000 visited the initiative homepage buzzfeed.turbovote.org.
In terms of content views, #TurnUpToVote content garnered more than 25M+ unique views, with 13M+ views alone for our video with President Obama. In addition, our initiative was featured across broadcast, print, and online such as MSNBC, The Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly.
