Spring 2023

VIP: VoterTech

Class Meetings: Tuesday, 3:30–4:20PM
Location: Klaus 1440

Overview

We are sunsetting the VoterTech VIP this spring. Over the past three years the class has accomplished a lot to use the unique resources and expertise at Georgia Tech to help students and the wider campus community vote in local and national elections. In this final semester of the class we will focus on creating a durable set of resources that will help on-campus organizations in future get-out-the-vote campaigns. As we’ve learned over the last few years, many organizations on campus engage their membership in the run up and during election seasons. But often, those groups are starting afresh in how they go about getting the word out, how the drive interest, and how they gather and share accurate information about changing voting rules and procedures. This is where we can help most.

Design Brief

The deliverable for this spring is a Voter Engagement Playbook. The format of the playbook will be primarily digital – interactive – with appropriate paper-based elements/templates to support specific goals. Each project team will need to look at the totality of activity from VoterTech since it’s beginning in Spring of 2020. These historic materials, plans, activities, and the schedule/cadence of activities will help you structure a general set of guidelines and activities (i.e. plays) to help on-campus organizations.

Some things to consider as you begin bringing materials together:

  • What assets do we have or need to develop to support social media outreach?
  • Time management: what needs to happen when for a successful campaign?
  • What information needs to be gathered, by when, from what sources? Is there any automation/scraping examples to help a group get started?
  • What off-campus organizations can help?

You will, of course, have a lot of content for this playbook already in some form from prior semesters, but there is much more new content to develop to go from the specifics of what we’ve done here, to create a guide that is more general purpose and offers a systematic approach that can be replicated.

Schedule

This is the meeting/presenting cadence for the semester. This schedule may get adjusted as needed.

WK 1 Intoduction & Administrivia
 
Discuss the project brief.
 
WK 2 Work day
 
 
 
WK 3 Work day
 
 
 
WK 4 Presentations
 
 
 
WK 5 Work day
 
 
 
WK 6 Work day
 
 
 
WK 7 Presentations
 
 
 
WK 8 Work day
 
 
 
WK 9 Work day
 
 
 
WK 10 Presentations
 
 
 
WK 11 No Class
 
Spring Break!
 
WK 12 Work day
 
 
 
WK 13 Work day
 
 
 
WK 14 Work day
 
 
 
WK 15 Final Presentations
 
 
 
WK 16 No Class

Conference travel.