Good morning and welcome to Bigtent’s weekly Newsletter. As the team that’s registered the most voters on TikTok, we take you behind the scenes of social media influence and Election 2020:
The Homestretch to Voter Registration Deadlines
BOOM!!!! 💣💣💣 as of this AM we’ve registered over 13,500 voters. We surpassed 10k voters registered on Friday, marking a massive milestone for BigTent Creative.
That's our registrations week over week. If that graph were a stock📈, we could all ponder retirement.💰
In the last week since we debuted the #TikTokFightsBack campaign and we’ve seen a ton of traction as Gen Z has advocated against the ban that would deplete the platform they mobilize most on, while simultaneously registering their followers to vote.
With voter registration (VR) deadlines approaching on October 4 in Alaska and Rhode Island and on October 5 in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, we're seeing serious uptick in swing states.
Check out Florida, Georgia, and Ohio!!! Those states had VR increases from our campaigns of 138%, 164%, and 105% respectively in the past week.
Partnerships in Texas
Last week we reported an interesting uptick in VR in Texas. Since then, we’ve partnered with two great organizations VoteSimple and VoteAmerica to identify 990 voters who started the process of registering to vote and needed help completing it.
Through their partnership, voters are receiving pre-filled, hard copies of their voter registration forms, along with the postage needed to mail it in. Why are we doing this? Because many young voters don’t own printers, and the cost of postage presents an economic hurdle. The data shows this kind of partnership works, as 93% of these voters were able to successfully complete their voter registration.
Expanding Beyond TikTok
An axiom shared by organizers and marketers alike is you have to meet people where they are. Pew Research Center has shown that visual social media platforms are where Gen Z is spending most of their time, places like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitch, not platforms like Facebook. That is why Bigtent Creative's voter registration and GOTV efforts have expanded into YouTube, Instagram, and Twitch. As you read this, we are experimenting with additional platforms to reach new voters.
Youtube
Every subculture has a desire to make impact and we’re helping these subcultures register their members. Take James Janisse for instance, who runs the Youtube channel Dead Meat, which reviews and discusses horror films.
The content he produces is followed by a niche audience, however in the last few weeks he’s registered 2,137 voters. It would be impossible to get this outcome from voters in such a manner by knocking doors or making phone calls.
We’re hitting breakthrough numbers by collaborating with Instagram creators and meme pages that are known for viral social content in the platform’s Stories format. In a matter of just a few weeks, we’ve registered over 1.5k people from Instagram alone! This post in particular went viral, which led to 735 voter registrations.
(This week’s viral IG meme)
While Stories are only visible for a day, they’re seen by an aggregate of 500 million users in that day. We think that Instagram meme posts and Stories help underline what we already know from our work with TikTok - that voting is fun, necessary, and it’s what so many creators across the internet will be doing this November.
Twitch
Twitch, more than other platforms, creates especially close relationships between streamers and the 37 million viewers who tune into Twitch streams at least once a month. That's why this month, we experimented with eleven Twitch creators who were streaming everything from Minecraft to arts & crafts. Bigtent collaborators on Twitch got creative: body paint streamer A.F. Kayt urged her viewers to register to vote before painting a "I Voted sticker onto her face" on one stream, while sports streamer Mills argued for voter registration in an impassioned speech to his viewers.
12% of these registrations were from Texas, likely attributable to two big Texan Twitch streamers participating in the campaign, yet another sign that Texas online registration deserves more attention. Twitch has its own challenges for registration, like the length of streams or ability to find new content, but it's essential to find voters where they are, and that includes Twitch streamers who have built up dedicated followings. We can also see that our Twitch campaigns are able to reach young voters, 49% of our Twitch registrations came from Gen Z voters alone!
TikTok dodges US ban… for now
This week in TikTok Ban news, we saw the social media giant use another of its nine lives to postpone the US government’s efforts to remove the app from app stores. Here’s what we know:
Last week, TikTok filed an injunction which bore some fruit this week as a judge partially granted its request for a stay of removal. As on today, you can still download the app!
While Judge Carl Nichols’s opinion was issued under seal, Nichols indicated in the hearing that the ban could be seen as a failure to provide due process rights to TikTok… We couldn't agree more.
This is a huge win for TikTok and our content creators who are actively working to get voters registered in time for November, but this battle is far from over. The Commerce Department agreed to obey the injunction, but the Department plans to fight to continue pursuing the shut down of TikTok.
From our side of things, 94% of college students who are registered to vote are planning on voting this election, but not all of them are registered yet. With that high level of commitment from registered voters, it’s critical we continue to get Gen Z registered. At Bigtent, we know how to get the number of registered Gen Z voters up by using TikTok, and this injunction helps us do just that by keeping the app in stores and halting what we think is a miscarriage of due process.
(Image Source: NBC News)
As TikTok officials pointed out during the hearing, crippling one of the main forms of communication for young people at a time when open discussion is critical is not a good look, and we’re happy to see that the courts agree.
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We’ll be back with new information, data, and analysis from our campaigns every week from now until Election Day. Help us spread the word about how crucial TikTok, online voter registration, and the other work we are doing is by forwarding this email to friends who care about democracy and voter outreach. Have questions or media inquiries? Contact us at bigtent@bigtentcreative.com.