2021 was a national election off-year, but New Yorkers were preparing for an important election within their neighborhood: the New York City Council election. Small and mighty, the Friends of Erik Bottcher campaign ran a direct voter outreach program and activated New Yorkers to organize their communities to elect Erik. In the end, the campaign sent over 1,000 messages and facilitated over 6,000 conversations with voters on Impactive. 

Organizing Relationally to Drive Success

Like many other local campaigns, Erik Bottcher’s campaign was powered by volunteers and their ability to mobilize their communities. The team’s strategy focused on prompting personal conversations among New Yorkers to spread the word about Erik — in other words, they planned to run a robust distributed relational organizing program. 

As a result, the Bottcher campaign partnered with Impactive to run a high-impact organizing program. Impactive’s Friends and Family Messaging suite allowed organizers to create coordinated messaging points for volunteers. Curated messaging scripts on Impactive ensured efficient and consistent outreach by volunteers who reached out to people they knew best. Then, volunteers filled reports for each personal contact so the campaign could stay up-to-date with the latest information on contacts.

Scaling Volunteer Mobilization with Impactive

Within just a few weeks, the Friends of Erik Bottcher campaign built up a core team of a few hundred volunteers who collectively knew over 3,000 personal contacts registered to vote within the district. Then, volunteers sent 1,240 messages and filled out over 4,000 reports on their friends, families, and neighbors over several months.

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With their volunteer program up and running, the team implemented the following tactics:

• Happy Birthday Messages: Volunteers sent happy birthday wishes to voters from their district, leading to a personal conversation between the recipient and volunteer through Impactive’s Peer-to-Peer Texting
• Volunteer Recruitment: Once a week, the campaign team used peer-to-peer messaging to send out volunteer recruitment messages to digital leads and likely supporters
• Direct Voter Contact: Staffers and volunteers sent out thousands of messages to constituents to spark conversation about Erik between supporters and voters, and sent multiple campaigns out to Get Out the (Early) Vote

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The team also held weekly Impactive Zoom training sessions to guide supporters on reaching out to their personal networks about volunteering for the campaign. During these sessions, organizers focused on helping volunteers harness the power of their personal connections to elect Erik. Volunteers invited friends and family to discuss support for Erik and to join training events. They also used Impactive to search for neighbors and friends in the voter file, then filed reports directly on the app on those contacts’ support for Erik.

As a result of these grassroots and volunteer-led efforts, Erik drew the support of community members across multiple neighborhoods in west Manhattan. He was successfully elected to represent City Council District 3.