CiviL SOCIETY
Using Past Reflection to Motivate Future Voting
The Problem
Well-documented research shows that even deeply felt civic motivations can erode quickly over time. ideas42 got to work designing how to leverage moments of heightened civic activity to motivate future voters.
Our Solution
In partnership with Vote.org, ideas42 developed the Civic Action Time Capsule: a simple, web-based tool that captured people's motivations and civic actions with a plan to return those reflections to them years later as a prompt to stay civically involved.
In December 2020, Vote.org sent out a series of emails about the time capsule, reaching a subset of their users.
In 2022, ahead of the midterm elections, ideas42 designed a randomized controlled trial to test whether returning participants' capsule responses would motivate them to re-engage. Half of participants received a personalized email with their 2020 time capsule responses alongside a call to get involved in the midterms. The other half received a standard civic engagement email with no personalization.
The Results
In total, 1,924 people filled out a capsule. Participants who received their personalized time capsule were significantly more likely to open the email than those who received the standard outreach, with a 44% open rate, compared to a 38% open rate for the control. This effect could be attributable to the subject line: Your 2020 Civic Action Time Capsule returned! outperformed the generic Get engaged in the 2022 election!
The prospect of seeing their own past words was itself motivating.
Both groups voted at higher rates than the national average of 52.2% in 2022, reflecting that the sample was more highly engaged than average. Among all participants, the people who received the capsule voted at a slightly higher rate (70.1% vs. 67.1%), though this difference was not statistically significant at this sample size.
The most compelling finding emerged when we looked into participants who had described themselves as highly engaged in 2020: we saw a 6.8 percentage point increase in turnout among participants who reported being at or above their desired level of engagement in 2020. Voting pilots are often celebrated when they lead to a three percentage point increase in voter participation. Our findings among highly engaged participants was over double this amount. This suggests that the time capsule is especially powerful for people who have a strong civic identity to reactivate, and signals promise in more efforts to use past-self motivations to inspire current action.
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↑ 6.8%
in voter turnout among highly engaged participants
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44%
email open rate with time capsule-related subject line compared to 38% for the control
