A citywide campaign to build trust in the electoral process, increase voter turnout, and introduce ranked choice voting to New Yorkers before the city’s historic 2021 June Primary Election.
NYC Votes — Primary Election
Building trust in the electoral process
- Campaign
Collaborators: Topiary Productions
NYC Votes and The New York City Campaign Finance Board launched a new brand identity during a landmark election year in which every city government seat was on the ballot. As part of a broad reimagining of their communications and public perception, including an engaging and empowering rebrand by Pentagram, NYC Votes asked us to create a citywide campaign to build trust in the electoral process, increasing voter turnout, and introduce ranked choice voting to New Yorkers before the city’s historic 2021 June Primary Election. We kickstarted our work with a voter workshop and developed campaign messaging to speak to the needs of New Yorkers through the actual issues they care about. The resulting campaign included over 150 assets in five different languages across a range of media channels from print to digital to outdoor, and led to the highest city election turnout in two decades. We carried the success of the Primary campaign into another for the November General Election.
The campaign resulted in the highest NYC voter turnout in two decades for a city election.
“The Once-Future team has a powerful (and rare!) ability to create intelligent, nuanced designs while also genuinely welcoming and engaging community feedback in their process. The way they invited and responded to input from our youth ambassadors was generative, insightful, and ultimately helped us create a better, more effective campaign. The outcome: one of the highest-turnout local elections in NYC in decades, including increased participation from youth.”
Charlotte Levitt, Director of Marketing & Digital Communications, New York City Campaign Finance Board
