Votebot.uk is a FB Messenger chatbot getting young voters to the polls.
It’s a personal assistant they can rely on to keep them registered, get them the info they need, and remind them to vote.
Your life might feel like chaos in a storm, but your Votebot has your back. Its singular mission: help you be the best you, by voting for the causes you care about.
And your Votebot's for life, not just for Xmas :) It knows you, keeps you registered and informed, and on top of your voting admin; so why get rid of it? We believe in Votebot's long-term potential to boost young voter civic engagement.
This election is the most important of our lifetime. The outcome will disproportionately affect the lives of younger people; yet 2 million of them didn't vote in the last election.
The logistical and psychological hurdles to civic engagement are greatest for those with the most at stake. Votebot helps nudge, remind, and direct young people towards registration, and ultimately to the polling station.
There are a number of great initiatives to get young voters to the polls this election. But Votebot is the only one engaging them where they spend the majority of their time online: text chat. Benefits of this strategy:
- Chat apps are the top app used by <30's
- This demographic use chatbots already
- Consistent presence in your chat friends list
- Extremely high response rates (15-60% vs 4% email)
- Low-friction conversational UI
- Two-way communication
- Engaging, personalised user experience
- Low-friction sharing actions
- Low-cost
We're implementing a targeted, issue-focused messaging campaign. Research shows young voters care much more about single issue campaigns than the electoral process. So we've implemented a series of issue-themed landing pages (e.g. climate, NHS, mental health etc.) that link the issue they care about to voting.
We're acutely aware that using research-backed communication strategies will maximise engagement and action:
- Social norms
- Social pressure
- Invoking the self
- Language framing
- Plan-making
- Personalisation
- Trusted messenger
- Habit formation
- Salience
- FOMO!
Successful voting assistant chatbots have operated in the last 2 US elections, validating our approach.
Lastly, the Votebot persona is funny, succinct, relatable and engaging. Translating dry, administrative voting tasks into a simple and well designed user experience perfectly pitched for its target audience.
We're a small team of volunteers that really, really, really care about young people getting the future they deserve.
The Votebot team:
- Kat Smith (design) @robotokat
- Ali Adair (ux) @aliallover
- Pete Dale (product) @peterbdale
- Helle Abelvik-Lawson (social) @Abelvixx
- Hana Rohan (research) @no_palindrome
We are digital product, media and research professionals with decades of experience.
Our Votebot concept was born chatting to each over WhatsApp (oh the irony)! We realised it'd be great to have an informed friend kicking us into gear to get our voting admin sorted :) And we needed it (late-30-something's) we realised young voters definitely would!
We spent the next 2 weeks in a sleepless, mad-dash hurricane build process. The result: the Votebot FB Messenger chatbot. Validated through multiple testing rounds with target users, and scalable up to hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
We are members of the TechForUK social tech collective, and benefit from a network of supportive and highly skilled, positive social change makers.
Previously our team launched finalsay.app, an innovative campaign tool that allows constituents to send honest and heartfelt 60 second audio messages to their MP's, explaining why they want a second EU referendum.
Our primary goal: have as many young voters signed up by polling day as is humanly possible. The more users, the more 'Get Out The Vote (GOTV)' nudges we can deliver, the greater the turnout.
Our secondary goal: maximise the percentage of users creating 3-person close-friend voting groups (aka Votesquads). This new GOTV technique was trialed in the US last year and was shown to be hugely effective.
Votebot is up and running, but we need your help to meet these goals. This is how we'll use your support to do it:
- Paid social media Instagram ads
- Distribution through GOTV campaign group networks
- Iterate Votebot functionality to maximise in-chat actions
The more we raise, the more young voters vote in the 2019 General Election. It's that simple.