INTRO

Chief Creative Officer at youth democracy group Bite The Ballot, my strategy, content and campaigns led to world firsts, breaking world records, holding decision makers to account and halting the decline of 18-24 turning out at elections in the UK

why

I hated politics. I wasn't even registered to vote, never mind ever voted before. This all changed for the 2015 General Election when Jamal Edwards asked me to get involved with something called Bite The Ballot, who were trying to engage and register young people to vote. The UK youth had been labelled 'politically apathetic’, and the stats seem to back up the assertion.

I felt angered by politics, I grouped it together with my school education, full of rubbish. Who were these people and why was I never told about voting, at school I was taught how to put a condom on, why wasn’t I informed how to vote. Bite The Ballot felt the same way, and I felt I could empathise with young people as I included myself in the apathetic masses. Something needed to be done, and our leaders weren’t going to do anything.

what?

My role in the ‘revolution’ would be as Chief Creative Officer of Bite The Ballot and without huge budgets and but a small group of ‘activists’ lead on creating a strategy to halt the youth vote turnout at the general election.
I strategically led Bite The Ballot through a series of organisation defining campaigns in a year long creative strategy aimed at increasing voter turnout for the GE15 in the UK. Devising a 12 month election strategy for the organisation, driving digital to its core and consisting of a 5 step plan - Engage, Register, Educate, Inspire, Turn out.

how?

BTB we’re very focused on offline and grassroots work when I joined them in April 2014, they hadn’t posted on FB or Twitter for a number of months, never mind having a strategy in place to engage, educate and register the masses.

To rectify this I lead the in-house policy, digital and grassroots teams, devising a content plan to get us moving online again. I created brand and social guidelines, leading design teams to create asset banks of evergreen content for social channels and scheduling in advance. This gave the organisation the ability to be responsive and create relevant content to engage young people who weren’t already politicised.

I then set about changing the perception of Bite The Ballot not just public facing but to the government, other orgs and companies. The website, the way we spoke and using my experience making video content and utilising my relations with some of the brightest creators out there such as Harry Hitchens and Alex Odam.

I believed we needed to act like a political party trying to win the election for young people, and that is exactly what we did. The first step was to engage young people with political content, somehow we convinced the leaders of the political parties to take part in the world’s first youth focused live stream on YouTube. From name to format of the show, creating various pitch decks to convince ITV to be production partner, managing stakeholder such as Twitter, Independent and SB.TV.

Once we had engaged millions of young people through our daily content and initiatives such as Leaders Live it was time to get the young masses registered to vote. National Voter Registration Day [NVRD] was created by BTB in 2014, a day all about, you guessed it, registering to vote. Incredibly this day didn’t already exist, so BTB as usual took up the reins and created it, in 14’ they registered between 20-50,000 using paper forms. It was up to me and the team to beat this, and we now had online registration which gave us a destination to drive people towards. Our focus was on organisations, companies and education to push the message of NVRD alongside celebrity endorsements and our own social content. We registered 166,000 on NVRD and 450,00 the week of NVRD. World records broken.

A huge problem facing us now we had all these new people on the electoral role,  they had no idea what the parties stood for, and what they were offering. Most people, never mind young people, find time to read the parties manifestos, we needed to create something aimed at them, in a way they like things.

That is why we built Verto, a voter advice tool aiming to help potential voters compare their views and values with the political parties on a variety of issues. That could be accessed on any browser or your smartphone, tablet or desktop. On the front-end, a user simply agrees or disagrees with a set of statements (for example, ‘should the UK leave the EU?’). It’s politics, made simple. 440,000 people played Verto, I was overall project lead, a technical build with many stakeholders, managing relationships with partners such as the Independent, Starbucks and Twitter.

So what and who gave a shit?

My strategy led to a 2000%+ increase in online brand reach, campaigns and evergreen content which led to 440,000 registrations, increased web traffic by 10,000%. Perhaps the most important KPI was to halt the 20 year decline in voter turnout amongst the youth - we helped increase turnout by a minimum of 8% for GE2015. Mike Sani, Oliver Sidorcick and the team deserve huge credit for picking up the fight and I hope to see them breaking down walls for years to come.

Next: Copa 90