As the country rounds into the last lap of the 2016 presidential race, nonprofits are intensifying their efforts to register people to vote and encouraging them to exercise that right at the ballot box.
There’s a lot of work to be done: Four years ago, about 58.7 percent of eligible voters cast presidential ballots, and turnout slipped to 36.7 percent in the 2014 midterms, a 72-year low.
Still, nonprofits leaders say their organizations are uniquely well-positioned for the work. Offering on-site registration services, teaching young people the history of suffrage struggles, and providing election information in relevant languages to immigrant communities are fitting extensions of many groups’ missions, they say, because participating in the election empowers the recipients of charity services.
“The communities we serve have historically been unrepresented, and we want to make sure they’re part of this process, part of making these important decisions,” says Brian Miller, executive director of Nonprofit VOTE, which promotes civic-engagement work by charities. “Our message is simple: Your voice should be heard.”
And nonprofits themselves may benefit from asking their constituents to vote, because high turnout among charity clients may signal the importance of nonprofits to politicians.
“Elected officials need to understand the value of investing in human services and what that brings back to individuals, families, communities,” says Marlo Nash, senior vice president for public policy and mobilization at the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities. “Nonprofits are a very credible and well-positioned voice to articulate that.”
Getting Out The Vote
With less than two months until Election Day, nonprofit associations across the country are encouraging members to incorporate voter outreach into their work. Several — including Alliance for Strong Families and Communities and Independent Sector, which advocates for nonprofits — have formulated campaigns with Nonprofit VOTE, highlighting the organization’s voter-registration and get-out-the-vote toolkits and its guide to promoting civic engagement in a nonpartisan fashion, as IRS regulations dictate.
To conduct voter outreach, nonprofits train staff members on registration procedures, incorporate election education into their existing programs, and host special events related to civic engagement, among other efforts.
For example, the Kansas City Board of Elections deputized three employees at Cornerstones of Care, a direct-services provider in the city, giving them the authority to register people to vote at the charity’s offices, on a walk-in basis, on the first Tuesday of every month. Case managers at the nonprofit are also encouraged to distribute voting information among families they work that take in foster kids.
In 2014, the Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement House in New York City partnered with civic-engagement group Community Votes to encourage people to participate in the midterm elections. The settlement house’s first project was getting its employees to register; about 85 percent did, according to executive director Christopher Hanway.
“Most of our staff is lower-income people of color, who are the hardest to get turned out to vote,” he says.
After training a cohort of staff members on how to register people to vote, the nonprofit ran registration campaigns among its program participants and asked them to sign pledge-to-vote cards, which were later mailed to their homes to remind them of their commitment. As part of its outreach, the settlement house enlisted the help of people who speak languages common in its Queens neighborhood, including Spanish, Arabic, Bangla, and Chinese. To teach young people about the importance of voting, the nonprofit invited them to talk to older African-American in the community who grew up in the South during the civil-rights era.
The results? According to a study Jacob A. Riis conducted with a voter clearinghouse, individuals it contacted went to the polls at a 40 percent higher rate than the general population in 2014.
This fall, the nonprofit has amped up its campaign and helped spread its work by organizing trainings for staff members at other settlement houses through the umbrella organization United Neighborhood Houses. It plans to host a party for National Voter Registration Day — September 27 — with games, quizzes, and food.
‘Low-Hanging Fruit’
There has been some foundation support for this kind of work: Since 2013, grant makers have put more than $86 million into voter education, registration, and turnout, according to data compiled by Foundation Center. The biggest supporters include the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Bauman Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. Several of the largest grants were made to support voter-engagement programs for Latinos, who voted at a rate of 48 percent in the 2012 presidential election.
In the realm of civic engagement, voter outreach is “low-hanging fruit,” Mr. Hanway says (although he notes that some federal money can’t be used for registration efforts). Over the course of three years, voter-engagement work has cost the settlement house less than $5,000, encompassing nominal expenses for printing and postage, food and music at events, and staff time on the weekends. It’s a low-cost way to help people “become change agents who make decisions for their communities,” Mr. Hanway says, and “a good starting point for more active civic-engagement strategies.”
Special Responsibility
Organizations like Cornerstones of Care and Jacob A. Riis have a unique ability, and therefore a unique responsibility, to encourage people to vote, Mr. Miller believes.
“Communities served by nonprofits are far more likely to be young, low-income, new-citizen groups like Latinos and Asian-Americans. These are the very groups typically voting at much lower rates than the rest of society,” he says.
They are also less likely to be asked to vote by political campaigns, according to Mr. Miller.
“Those campaigns focus limited resources on people who have a history of voting. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle,” he says. “Who’s well-positioned to break that feedback loop? We believe nonprofits.”
That hypothesis is backed by research from a recent Nonprofit VOTE study, which analyzed the effects of nonprofits’ voting campaigns on nearly 29,000 people who registered or signed a voting pledge at 129 organizations in nine states leading up to the 2014 elections.
Compared to all registered voters in those states, people contacted by nonprofit campaigns were twice as likely to be under age 30, three times more likely to be black or Latino, and four times more likely to have a household income under $25,000.
Voter turnout was 15 percent higher for Latino voters, 31 percent higher for black voters, and 46 percent higher for Asian-American voters. It was 31 percent higher for those with household incomes under $25,000, and 28 percent higher for voters under age 30.
Overcoming Resistance
Yet it’s not always easy to convince members of marginalized communities to take the time to vote. Nonprofit employees doing outreach work often encounter skepticism.
“This is a disenfranchised community, passed over for decades, so you have to give a concrete example” of how voting can affect public policy in ways that are relevant to their lives, Mr. Hanway says. He trains staff members and volunteers to ask people what issues matter to them and provide examples of how city-council and mayoral elections influence those issues.
The 65-year history Jacob A. Riis has with its community also helps lower the barrier of suspicion.
“People have a level of trust with us,” Mr. Hanway says. “Not everybody, but a vast majority of people do. Our messaging carries extra weight.”
Carol Grimaldi, manager of community engagement and advocacy at Cornerstones of Care, has also encountered resistance. She recalls talking about voting to a group of Kansas City teenagers who were aging out of the foster-care system.
One participant in the conversation dismissed politics and government as “a bunch of malarkey,” Ms. Grimaldi says. But another young man chimed in about the importance of state and local elections and “gave a powerful discourse on policies in Jefferson City that affect their lives,” she says, referring to Missouri’s capital.
Those moments of engagement make the work worthwhile, she says, as do small victories, like the day last year when Cornerstones of Care registered three alumni of the foster-care system to vote.
“That made my heart sing,” Ms. Grimaldi says. “To share with them the importance of, ‘This is part of being a citizen’ — that’s probably the most meaningful part of this for me.”
Potential Voting Bloc
It’s not just service recipients who are affected by elections. With government grants and rules on charitable tax deductions subject to legislators’ and policy makers’ decisions, nonprofit service providers have a stake in the outcome, too.
“As a family- and youth-serving organization, the policies that are made primarily at the state and federal level really have some bearing on the quality of care that we can give families and children and their quality of life in our community,” Ms. Grimaldi says.
Independent Sector would like nonprofits to view voter outreach as an opportunity to tell candidates “about the importance of the work we do,” says Geoffrey Plague, the group’s vice president of public policy. “We think it’s important that the charitable sector becomes seen as an active and regular voting bloc.”
He cited the National Rifle Association as an example of an advocacy organization that commands candidates’ attention because politicians know NRA supporters are active voters.
“We don’t think there is that assumption on the part of elected officials about the nonprofit sector,” he says. “A well-developed cadre of voters from the nonprofit sector, who regularly vote, and who communicate to candidates and elected officials the importance of the nonprofit sector, will over time strengthen our ability to be effective advocates.”
Leaders at the California Association of Nonprofits make a point to tell state legislators that California charities have nearly 1 million employees and 5 million volunteers — a significant portion of the state’s electorate. The association’s Vote With Your Mission campaign encourages employees, volunteers, and board members to vote with the values of their organization in mind, says chief executive Jan Masaoka.
“If everyone who worked at an environmental organization voted, we’d have better environmental conditions. If everyone who worked in the arts voted, we’d have better arts funding,” she says. “We could be a voter bloc if we thought of ourselves that way.”
Among the campaign resources available on the association’s website, one item in particular has proven popular, Ms. Masaoka says: templates for buttons that declare, “I work for a nonprofit and I vote.”
