Voteforchange.com was the official Obama for America voter registration initiative aimed at young, first-time voters. Instead of treating voting like a civic duty, we addressed it as a worthwhile place to address one’s personal interests. We asked hundreds of young people why they planned to vote, regardless of their political ideology. We then commissioned dozens of artists to create pieces based on those reasons that would form the basis of the campaign.
Vote For Change logo cling and voteforchange.com site. The site guides users throught the entire process of registering to vote as well as verifying and updating their voting registration.
The following pieces were used as print ads in college and alternative papers. The most popular designs were printed as posters, stickers and hand cards given to student organizations who acted as street teams and guerilla media.
We asked volunteers around the country to record their reasons into their webcams and edited them together for use as pre-roll video. Sending off a script and recieving a link to a video of Barack Obama reading my script was a very surreal experience.
We used audio from those sessions for radio during the registration campaign.
After registration had closed, our focus switched to getting people to the polls. The traveling AV team would post audio from Obama's speeches, and we would edit them into radio ads with state-specific voting information. I pretty much lived at Pomann Sound in the month or so leding up to the election.
We commissioned The Alchemist to create a beat-driven version of our get out the vote spots, but was never aired due to the campaign's concern that his work with Eminem might be too controversial during the final days of the campaign.
Our materials were used at campaign events to register voters. Obama clubs at college campuses were deputized as street teams. They distributed posters, stickers and window clings to first-time voters.
During the final 10 days of the campaign, we partnered with txtual healing to do interactive guerilla projections in college towns. People would text in their reasons for voting, be they serious or trivial. We only censored profanity, letting people say pretty much whatever they pleased.
We commissioned a portrait based on economic recovery from Tristan Eaton for a planned second phase of the reasons campaign that was abandoned in favor of a more traditional get out the vote campaign. We thought the piece was too good to go to waste, so we helped Tristan's studio Thunderdog launch his own Thundervote effort.
Street artists downloaded PDF posters with voting information for their state. Not being officially connected with the campaign, Thundervote participants could wheat paste posters where ever they wanted. To raise awareness within the street art community, Tristan created a custom papercraft voting both and a Thundervote Fuji art bike. A simple site contained all the files artists needed, links to voter registration information, and information on how important it is to vote.
