San Diego County Democratic Party
Case Study
Role: Digital Advertising Strategist, Website Developer, and Graphic Designer
Deliverables: New voter guide website and digital advertising strategy to promote it
The Outcome: Reached over 95,000 registered voters and increased voter turnout in down ballot races
The Challenge
The San Diego County Democratic Party (The Party) creates a voter guide for each election and shares the message with voters via mailers and door hangers. During the 2020 general election, the Party placed more emphasis on a digital strategy since traditional outreach methods were limited due to COVID-19. The Party creates regional voter guides, so the digital campaign had to be geo-targeted and feature custom creatives targeting each region.
Our Approach
We met with the Party to discuss their needs and then started to develop the foundation of the program, a voter guide website. This interactive site allowed voters to choose their geographic region by California Assembly District on a map to find personalized voting recommendations for their area. Since the 2020 election relied so heavily on voting by mail, we added an FAQ section to ensure voters could find accurate information about voting by mail or in-person at polling stations. We translated all the information in Spanish as well.
Once the website was ready, we launched a series of still social, programmatic, and display advertisements targeted at registered and likely voters to promote the voter guide. These ads used higher profile races and general turnout messaging to ensure people voted down the ballot for all the Party’s endorsed candidates. All ads were in English and Spanish, targeted based on language, and geo-targeted so that each region would see their personalized voter guide in their language.
Reached over 95,000 registered voters
The Facebook ads gained 771,294 impressions
The display/programmatic ads gained 651,631 impressions
Helped to increase voter turnout in down ballot races
The Impact
The Facebook ads gained 771,294 impressions and reached 95,328 voters and the display/programmatic ads gained 651,631 impressions. The voter guide helped to increase voter turnout in down ballot races and most of the candidates endorsed by the Democratic Party ended up winning in November.
