The Strategic Victory Fund is committed to learning from previous years and experiences. This commitment drives our belief that sustained investment in key states is critical to progressive successes — in 2020 and beyond. 

The “boom and bust” cycle of funding is one of the most predictable challenges that community organizations face. Often, organizations lay off staff immediately following the general election to prepare for funding to dry up in the “off-year.” In the first few months of 2019, SVF provided nearly $4 million in bridge funding for organizations in battleground states working in communities of color or led by a member of the New American Majority. SVF raised these bridge funds in 2018, anticipating this persistent cycle. The bridge funding allowed organizations to not only retain trained and experienced staff, but also to ensure that new funding in late 2019 and 2020 could be used efficiently towards strategic imperatives, rather than rebuilding lost capacity.

In addition to sustained investment in our people and infrastructure, SVF knew that winning in any of our states in 2020 would require a broad coalition of support, including record turnout in communities of color and women, among others. 

Understanding Voters Through Deep Research.

Early in the cycle, SVF funded deep research projects that would deliver more than a horse race number or issue battery. We invested in, and in some cases provided seed funding to incubate, research to help us understand how voters’ lives have been impacted by the Trump Administration and what parts of their lived experiences, hopes, and fears would drive their decisions about who to cast their ballot for in 2020. 

Black PAC

In 2019 and 2020, BlackPAC led a large-scale, longitudinal research project to explore a cross-section of voters’ structural and cultural challenges; attitudes toward voting and civic engagement; opinions on candidates, elected leaders, and civic organizations; issue and policy priorities specific to Black communities; and test the resonance of narrative frames and core messages that inspire and motivate Black communities and voters. Their approach tracked, over time, Black people’s personal and public concerns and boundaries around power, influence, voice, and vision through a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods, including phone and online surveys, focus groups, ethnographic research, and testing.

EquisLabs

Latinx voters

Founded in 2019, EquisLabs built a first-of-its-kind multi-state, large-scale research project focused on the Latinx community with the goal of increasing Latinx civic participation by reaching these voters effectively with impactful messages. Through tens of thousands of interviews with Latinx voters, qualitative research projects in targeted states, robust digital testing, and an integrated partnership and distribution network, the Equis team surfaced important and actionable insights on the experiences, issue preferences and political identities of Latinx voters to a broad audience of progressive operatives and organizers. Throughout the cycle, Equis also closely monitored right wing communication and disinformation to Latinx voters, raising red flags around the inroads this type of communication was making and the scale at which it might be impacting voter sentiment.

"It is no exaggeration to say that Equis Research would have in no way been possible without SVF. Some today are scrambling to understand the Latino vote; Scott, Carly and the SVF team were way ahead of the curve. They recognized that the complexities of the progressive coalition require an early, deep and sustained investment. As such, they made a bet on a program of early polling, data and innovative qualitative work that would go on to serve as the principal targeting and messaging resource for all the leading progressive programs focused on our community. That early research flagged potential strengths and vulnerabilities and helped partners engage voters who were critical in shaping results from Arizona to Wisconsin, and will prove to be even more important going forward."
-Carlos Odio, Co-Founder & Senior Vice President of EquisLabs

Union 2020

Former Union Members

Led by labor partners, SVF supported the Union 2020 program aimed at hundreds of thousands of former union members in the key states of Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as developing a model to identify voters who support labor-friendly policies. The research explored how best to reach this group that formerly was organized by their unions, and which messages and messengers resonated best. One of the core findings of this research was that former union members looked to their former unions and the labor movement as a trusted source of information. In response, the project developed the Union 2020 website to bring these voters important stories about working people on the front lines of the pandemic, inform them about policies affecting all workers, and provide ways to get involved or stay engaged.

Avalanche Strategy

Large-scale qualitative research

Throughout the 2020 election cycle, SVF, in partnership with other donors, conducted six rounds of research with Avalanche Insights, a survey firm specializing in conducting a mix of quantitative and qualitative research. Generally, our surveys with Avalanche focused on battleground states with large (10,000-15,000) sample sizes. The first three surveys - conducted in spring 2020, largely prior to the COVID pandemic - focused on testing narratives and ads that the Trump campaign intended to use in the general election. However, as coronavirus set in, we shifted focus with Avalanche to conduct a survey about how the country was reacting initially to the pandemic, as well as whether Trump was politically vulnerable on the issue. As summer turned into fall, our final two Avalanche surveys - conducted with Unite The Country and InvestinginUS - focused on the “law & order" narrative pushed by the Trump campaign in response to the ascendent Black Lives Matter movement. We learned how his message resonated with persuadable voters, as well as how Trump overreached: the data clearly showed that more than half of all Americans recognized that Trump's main motivation was political. No one else on the progressive side was conducting this kind of research, and it was clear our progressive allies deeply appreciated it.

Women Effect Action Fund

Persuadable women

The Great Lakes Women Project, supported by the Women Effect Action Fund, focused on reaching women that either didn’t vote in 2016, voted third party, or voted for Trump. The program kicked off in Wisconsin and Michigan, and engaged and organized these women around core economic issues like paid sick leave, family leave, and elder care with door-to-door canvassing, mail and a digital outreach program. GLWP ultimately expanded to ten states, going beyond the Great Lakes region to make nearly 15 million voter contact attempts with an overall budget of $26.8 million. SVF is proud to have made early investments needed to get this project off the ground.

Polling Consortium

The Polling Consortium has built the largest data warehouse of its kind, housing more than 6 million unique survey interviews. During the 2020 cycle, SVF invested in the Polling Consortium’s work to continue building out their inventory and conduct independent research projects. In addition to maintaining their expansive data warehouse, the Polling Consortium fielded monthly surveys throughout the cycle, utilized the data at their disposal to produce original analyses, conducted social media listening efforts in order to provide rapid insights into major news events, regularly updated key metrics for every congressional and state legislative district in the country, and provided support for a number of important progressive utilities, including Catalist, the Analyst Institute, and Equis. Their data maintenance and professional support were critical to building the models and programs that powered the entire progressive movement. SVF’s investment opened up access to the Consortium to grassroots groups in the states who have not previously been able to utilize their resources directly.

Through early investment in this essential research, SVF empowered the organizations above to fill research needs early in the cycle, allowing them to share their findings widely, with enough time to shape our understanding of the voters who were critical to a winning progressive coalition.

Building meaningful relationships through relational organizing

After taking a hard look at organizing and persuasion tactics, as well as an analysis of voter contact outcomes from past election cycles, SVF decided to invest in two key training programs to benefit state and national partners: relational organizing and content creation training programs. 

Relational Organizing Training

Empowering Activists to Organize Their Communities

Relational Organizing (RO) centers on training volunteers to reach out to friends and family to share personal stories around the issues that matter most to them. The tactic is driven by  authentically listening to others’ views and concerns and knowing how to respond. This demonstrated approach can help organizations activate, build, and expand their activist base and organizational reach. Relational organizing can increase the efficiency of organizing work and empower organizers to activate their personal networks. 

In 2020, SVF set out to help integrate RO into state plans and/or expand it in places that already utilize the tactic. The goal of our Relational Organizing training program was to ultimately increase the number and quality of personal interactions in 2020 by training partners and allies on the evolving tactics of relational organizing. 

Between March and October of 2020, more than 81,000 organizers at all levels – from the heads of organizations to their organizers to their activists – participated in Relational Organizing trainings. These sessions were led by our training partners at Organizing Empowerment Project, who worked directly with partners to tailor the curriculum to state or organization needs and create a training schedule. 

Given the reality of in-person organizing during a pandemic, RO training focused on online and social media relational organizing strategies, a big piece of which included sharing quality content within communities – the focus of our second series of training programs to benefit state and national partners.

“Extremely thankful that we had the opportunity to incorporate relational organizing into our program this year. The help and support gave us hope that we can accomplish more then we have in the past. Without the help and support of OEP I'm not sure how well we would have done this year. We continue to reach out and invite our supporters to join our app. It was our first year using a tactic like this and I see our list growing more and more as we get better at using this tactic.”

Pennsylvania training participant

Content Creation Training

Teaching Organizers to Be Digital Storytellers

It is critical to meet people where they are, and now more than ever that is online. In the context of our investment in relational organizing in 2020, SVF believed that by training digital storytellers across the country, we could help ensure that we had the right messengers, carrying the right message, reaching the right voters.

Our content creation training helped empower organizers to become the best possible storytellers using nothing more than their cell phone. Attendees learned best practices necessary to make their content engaging and compelling along with basics like lighting, sound essentials, editing tips, and interview tips. Additionally, in-state communications hubs had access to this stable of content creators to develop messages that break through the noise with the electorate.

Our training partners at Real Voices Media trained more than 2,500 organizers to be effective content creators. Their team produced nearly 4,900 grassroots videos, including 250+ nurse, teacher and postal worker videos, that garnered 11.7 million views. RVM also partnered with the state communications hubs to identify local micro-influencers and conduct “rapid response” quick-turnaround videos upon request.

The storytellers fed into a network of social media pages that targeted low information, unengaged voters to serve them highly curated content via organic social media posts. The network included 375 pages organized around affinity or career groups that are not political, such as Wisconsin grandparents, millennial Mainers, or North Carolina women. The pages have nearly 1.7 million fans and 3.1 million friends, and reach tens of millions more through organic sharing and advertising. Each page is run by real community managers at the local level with a “news you can use” approach that created trusted community based on deep relationships. The pages also helped identify and combat disinformation trends and inoculate their audiences from bad actors.

While these trainings empowered activists and organizers to be storytellers and organize their communities, they also scaled the capacity of the organizations these individuals were part of, expanding their reach and amplifying their message.

”Thank you...for putting on such an interactive and informative training...I finally comfortable making short videos and even feel prepared to use Tik Tok!

-Training Participant

Moving voters with creative and tested content

Research and training empowered organizers and activists with the knowledge and tools to reach progressive voters in key states. All too often, however, plans and preparation get lost in execution. Furthermore, we know that voters face a constant barrage of both paid and organic content. In 2020, we needed to be a larger part of the online conversation by playing to our strengths: empowering effective messengers and amplifying the most impactful messages at scale.

Communications & Research Hubs

Learning the lessons of 2016 about deficiencies in the progressive political infrastructure, SVF invested in research and communications hubs in eight target states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The eight communications hubs served as a center of gravity for coordination of digital messaging among independent groups in each state. Each hub had sophisticated capabilities to create content, test it, and then amplify the right messages to the right voters.

One of the greatest assets of the progressive movement is that we have the best validators for our messages in every town across the country – teachers, nurses, firefighters, and so many more. To identify those messengers, the hubs partnered with grassroots groups, who have deeply authentic relationships with their communities, to boost their voices as trusted messengers. Dozens of organizations in each of these battlegrounds were convened to coordinate their digital communications systems, share learnings and plan collaboratively to improve programs across the board and avoid redundancies or gaps.

The hubs were also critical to the reach and success of SVF’s training programs. They facilitated trainings for community leaders to teach them to effectively tell their stories and those of their friends, neighbors, and coworkers through their own social media pages, while simultaneously creating a bank of low-cost content featuring trusted messengers to test and target to the appropriate audiences.

But while voters needed to hear from us about holding Trump accountable and what progressives stand for, we also needed to listen to what voters were saying in order to be responsive. All of the states used values-based voter models to provide a richer understanding of how to effectively micro-target messages to the right audiences in a way that goes beyond traditional demographics and geographies to meet voters where they are. Creating a feedback loop between research, communications and organizing allowed all of those programs to learn from each other, and working in a cohort allowed the states to learn from each other as well.

Additionally, “layering” tactics – reinforcing the messages that communities and voters hear from organizers with digital ads – increased the effectiveness of those messages over time. State-based hubs build the relationships and trust that facilitate such a feedback loop.

These hubs were innovative and collaborative, building critical state-based infrastructure that empowered in-state operatives, communicators, and organizers to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively. They were an embodiment of the core principles of SVF and our community of donors. And at the end of the day, our analysis shows that the program run by the hubs had three times the impact of the typical presidential persuasion campaign, increase net Biden vote choice by 2.3 percentage points.

Examples

Michigan, “Better Days Ahead”

Pennsylvania, “Trump Lies”

Arizona, “Voices of Arizona – Lucia Salinas”

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J.J. AbbottExecutive Director of Commonwealth Communications (PA)

“Strategic Victory Fund’s support and guidance was an essential factor in our successful first cycle at Commonwealth Communications (Comms2) and Joe Biden’s decisive victory in Pennsylvania. His success was despite historic turnout for Trump, heavy disinformation and voter suppression, and significant effort by right-wing infrastructure.
Building this long-term infrastructure is key to winning the fights ahead and ensuring down ballot success in Pennsylvania, especially as we work to undo gerrymandering in 2021 and build power for progressives across Pennsylvania, which will be a battleground again in 2022 and 2024.
SVF and their team, especially Carly, Kelli, Jim and Kristina, provided the capacity, expertise and resources necessary for Comms2 to be founded just in March 2020 yet make a tremendous impact in the election and across the infrastructure in Pennsylvania, and position ourselves for long-term growth and impact.
A multi-racial working class coalition of voters delivered a victory for Joe Biden in Pennsylvania and SVF’s support and guidance for Comms2 and the movement's engagement of that coalition was integral and unprecedented. We are beyond grateful for SVF’s role in our first year and look forward to being a partner with them for years and victories to come.”

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Nicole SafarExecutive Director of A Better Wisconsin Together

“As an ED, I also very much appreciated the clear and direct lines of communication with Carly Hawkins and the SVF team. It was evident during our weekly check-ins how invested they were in our success. They always ensured that the decision making happened on the ground and that we had the flexibility to fit program decisions into our WI environment. It was really just a pleasure to work with this team!””

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Lonnie Scott & Anna SchollProgressNow

“The Strategic Victory Fund was a core, and dare I say strategic, partner in building and executing a nimble, sophisticated, and winning digital strategy across battleground states this year. From the very beginning SVF believed in the strategy of marrying data-driven research with values-based segmentation and that state-based communications hubs with their own creative production capacity and knowledge of the local landscape were key to a 2020 victory. But more than that, the SVF team dedicated resources to building long-term infrastructure and power in these states that will last beyond this election cycle and deferred to the expertise of the staff on the ground to drive program decisions. SVF's flexibility, dedication, and investment were key to building one of the most successful digital strategies of the cycle and key to the success of ProgressNow affiliates across the country.”

In 2020, our state hubs embodied SVF’s commitment to coordination and partnership. Their leadership helped build a culture of transparency between the hubs and other core pieces of in-state infrastructure – so strategies, plans, and tactics were regularly shared with donors and partner groups, making it unlike other national entities and party political committees. This made even small digital programs more effective, and saved millions of dollars by not duplicating research and digital outreach efforts. This is particularly true with regards to digital ad buys, where multiple organizations competing for the same space can drive up prices significantly. 

Both within our funding community and with other partners, the Strategic Victory Fund has created a culture of learning and accountability that challenges the conventional wisdom that too often limits our success. Nationally, SVF works with partners to connect national funding and state-based know-how to make sure programs are developed with the best thinking and that tactics are connected to an overall strategic plan that builds power and wins elections. 

We know that the progressive ecosystem comprises a wide variety of grassroots, issue and advocacy groups at the local, state and national level that all take on different tactics and lanes of work. Within the bounds of our commitment to confidentiality, SVF works collaboratively to ensure every dollar we invest has the greatest possible impact and that we are equally efficient with our greatest resource: time.