Overview

• Pew Center on the States, part of The Pew Charitable Trusts, began Make Voting Work (MVW) as a way to foster an election system that achieves the highest standards of accuracy, convenience, efficiency and security.
• To achieve its goals, MVW has held a number of high profile summits with Secretaries of State and state elections officials. The goals of these summits are to share best practices and encourage state officials to embrace and implement needed changes. MVW also holds news conferences and issues research findings.
• MVW focuses, in a non-partisan way, on issues faced by military and overseas voters, voter information, registration, alternatives to Election Day voting/early voting and other topics.

Communications Challenge

• MVW faced enormous challenges to gaining visibility for its efforts during a historic national election where most of the media were examining the major candidates, the debates and polls.
• MVW, to be successful, must continue to build on its strong relationships with state and military officials who hold the key to election reform. The media efforts and messages needed to reflect this level of cooperation.

Strategy

• Widmeyer worked with MVW to engage the polling team of Lake Research (Democrats) and the Tarrance Group (Republicans) to create a national poll and conduct focus groups that would illuminate the need for election reform. The research would also help in message development.
• Widmeyer secured desk side briefings with prominent political reporters, producers, columnists and editors in mid-summer 2008 during a relatively quiet time in the campaign. These meetings would serve as the basis for the journalists to call on the MVW experts during the heat of the fall campaign.

Tactics

• Widmeyer produced the creative and placed advertising on behalf of MVW’s military and overseas voter initiative. The ads appeared in Stars & Stripes, International Herald Tribune, and online for international visitors to The Washington Post and The New York Times Web sites.
• We developed extensive communications plans for the MVW summits and research reports including messages.

Results

• MVW and Pew were repeatedly referenced in a one-hour live interview segment on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal the morning of the military and overseas voting summit. The guests on the program were Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner (D) and Alabama Secretary of State Beth Chapman (R).
• MVW experts Michael Caudell-Feagan and Doug Chapin have been interviewed by The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (PBS), The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, NBC News, ABC News, NPR and numerous other media.
• The Widmeyer-produced ad helped inform military and overseas voters about a new online tool that allowed their votes to count on November 4. The latest data shows 125,000 Americans took advantage of this service—Americans who wouldn’t have known about their options without the extensive media campaign.