Best of CASE District VII Award
 

Institution: University of California, Davis

Title of entry: Aggies Vote

About this entry: With the 2020 general election upon us and nationally low voting rates among US college students, UC Davis set the goal to increase our student registration and voter turnout. The Aggies Vote was created by Student Affairs Marketing and Communications (SAMC) in collaboration with the UC Davis Student Voter Coalition and UC Davis Strategic Communications — a mix of students and career staff coming together to face this issue head on. We created a brand for the campaign that was incorporated into websites, email signatures, Zoom backgrounds, social media and videos.

We also created a central Aggies Vote website that linked to voter registration guides with timelines and deadlines created by SAMC, a student voter guide created by the student voter coalition and the CA Secretary of State’s website for registration and information about ballot initiatives.

We launched a full-scale digital campaign that utilized many of our existing channels with different calls-to-actions including registration, education, early voting and in-person voting — all without spending any budget outside of professional staff time. The campaign was a massive success, increasing from 43% in the 2016 to 75.7% in the 2020 election. This increase was so large, that we were awarded an award most improved among the student voting rates of nearly 300 four-year public colleges and universities, even despite the confusion caused by the pandemic.