Senior Associate, Voter Contact Innovations

Senior Associate, Voter Contact Innovations

LOCATION. LA, NYC, or remote, with some travel required for irregular in-person staff meetings (must be fully vaccinated and boosted for COVID-19 to travel)

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS. $80,346 – $87,578 annually depending on experience, with generous medical, dental, vision, and retirement

ROLE TYPE. This is a cycle-role with an end date of 12/31/24.

About the opportunity

Vote Rev has an incredibly powerful relational mobilization tactic that could lead to millions of voters being activated this fall, resulting in what could be the largest relational voter contact program in history. The Senior Associate of Voter Contact Innovations will report to the Program Manager to develop and execute a voter contact program that scales Vote’s Revs proven scalable relational turnout program, site-based vote tripling, and pilots another promising site-based relational turnout tactic.

The main program that will be run by the Voter Contact Innovations team is a tactic we call ‘site-based vote tripling’ (SBVT), where canvassers go to high traffic locations like grocery store parking lots or college campuses during Early Vote and on Election Day and ask passersby to text five or more friends on the spot. When implemented according to best practices on college campuses, SBVT produces between 30 and 50 voter contacts per canvasser-hour. A 2022 randomized controlled trial (the gold standard in testing) proved that this tactic boosts turnout.

The program will have an estimated budget of $10m-$40m, operating in up to seven states, and using multiple paid canvass vendors. Success looks like deploying thousands of paid canvassers across the country to engage in high-fidelity SBVT implementations that net thousands of votes across the country.

We aim to make an offer this role by no later than June 21, to enable the new hire to begin the week of June 24 to take part in program development in advance of a dry run in the Wisconsin primary (August 13), where canvassing could begin as early as the week of July 8.

Note: We are dedicated to creating an organization that reflects the diversity of the country we serve. We strongly encourage women, people of color, and others who are underrepresented in campaigns to apply.

Responsibilities

• Support Voter Contact Innovations team in all departments including operations, field and data management.
• Conceive and build systems and processes for internal efficiency and management of functions, filling in wherever needed to develop and execute this new, multi-faceted scaled voter contact innovation program
• Conduct research on vendors (e.g., paid canvass firms, technology), organize options, conduct outreach, and support selection, contracting, management, and payment processes, in coordination with Vote Rev’s Operations team
• Serve as project manager and administrative support for Voter Contact Innovations team, including monitoring progress towards meeting goals and achieving benchmarks, ensuring follow-through, and sustaining momentum needed to drive initiatives to completion
• Manage special projects and assignments to support all aspects of Voter Contact Innovations team (e.g. vetting and ordering t-shirts for paid canvassers or photographers to document the work, drafting a presentation to update other members of the Vote Rev team on the VCI team’s work, etc.)
• Liaise between Voter Contact Innovations Team and Operations/Research team
• Support coordination of logistics (expense reports, scheduling, travel arrangements), materials creation, and legal/compliance

Who we’re looking for

• At least 4 years of relevant, full-time work experience in field and/or operations (electoral campaign or allied organization preferred)
• Proficient in MS Office (Excel/Word/PowerPoint), Google Suite, and Zoom
• Exceptional organizational skills and attention-to-detail
• Demonstrated experience with logistics, including relationship management with vendors, and ensuring large quantities of materials get created, produced, ordered, and delivered on time, at budget, to multiple locations in a distributed environment
• Able to anticipate needs and eager to proactively offer support to meet them
• Resilient, creative, problem-solver, sense of humor, adaptable and able to roll with the punches

Requirements for the organization

• Commitment to the mission of the organization to design and quickly mainstream field-tested voter engagement innovations to help Democrats win
• Commitment to understand and actively oppose racism and promote equity
• Commitment to working with and for teams of diverse individuals, and, to reducing disparities in whose voice is heard in the electoral space
• Demonstrated awareness of one’s own cultural identity and ability to build relationships and collaborate across lines of difference
• Ability to thrive in a startup environment: you move quickly, think strategically, are adaptable to changing circumstances, and are good at tactical execution

Preferred but not required

• At least 1 cycle at Deputy level in Field, Operations, or relevant dept of campaign or allied organization
• Experience with CRMs and project management software like Copper (or VAN/Salesforce) and Asana
• Experience working at a campaign or allied organization
• Experience managing contracts and dealing with complex compliance

Reasons to love this role

• Your work will support the culmination of years of a unique blend of field work, design, and behavioral science research. Vote Rev can mainstream the tactics that could be the margin of victory in key races in 2024, and this work will play a vital role in that!
• Ability to make a difference in the 2024 election while still maintaining work-life balance.

Compensation and benefits

• Compensation: $80,346 – $87,578 annually depending on experience, with generous medical, dental, vision, and retirement
  (note: we do not negotiate on salary and provide our final offer up front based on our salary bands)
• Paid time off: All federal holidays. Each employee accrues 1.5 days of PTO each month (up to 18 days). The period of September 4, 2024 – November 6, 2024 is considered a vacation blackout period, and time off will only be approved for emergencies. Employees will still have regular weekends off, and after the Election Day all employees will have every Friday off, and December 23-31 (so Thursday, December 19 will be the last working day of the year).

Timeline

This application is rolling, and we encourage interested applicants to apply as soon as possible. We intend to close this application by June 10, 2024, but it could close earlier pending application volume.

We expect to make an offer to a candidate no later than June 21, 2024, and would like to be the start date as soon as possible after the offer is made. The hiring process consists of the following steps. At each step, some applicants will be removed from consideration and notified if they are not moving forward:

• Resume and application questionnaire screen: This step is to establish the baseline for candidates we will advance through the process.
• Phone interview: This will be a more in-depth conversation with a member of the Vote Rev team, and might include answering scenario-based questions.
• Case study: An at-home assignment that you are expected to take less than 2 hours to complete. This gives us a chance to see how you think and see an example work product.
• Final interview: At least two and no more than four applicants will be called back for a set of final-round interviews with the Hiring Manager, Deputy Executive Director, Ryan Cohen, and other members of the Vote Rev team. You should plan to reserve up to three hours of your time during business hours for this final round, if you advance to this step.
• References: We will ask for three professional and personal references for our top one or two candidates to learn more about working with them before extending an offer.
• Job offer: We provide our best and final offer in terms of compensation, which will be within the salary band shown in the job description. We base our offer on the number of years of relevant work experience and where that fits within our internal salary leveling system. We do not negotiate salary or other benefits due to research finding that introducing opportunities to negotiate results in pay disparities that are not correlated with competency. While the start date is somewhat negotiable, we have a strong preference for candidates who can start as soon as possible.

About the organization

Vote Rev is a PAC that designs and quickly mainstreams field-tested voter engagement innovations to help Democrats win. Its sister organization, Vote Rev Action Fund (VRAF), works with and for nonprofits that amplify the power of historically disenfranchised communities. The two organizations design prototypes of new voter and civic engagement tactics, refine early-stage but promising ideas, and then stress test those ideas, subjecting them to randomized controlled trials. Through this work, they develop new tactics to mobilize hard-to-reach voters and boost turnout. Vote Rev and Vote Rev Action Fund – with a shared staffing structure where each team member dedicates a portion of their time to each entity – support progressive campaigns and nonprofit organizations, respectively, to help them implement these tactics at scale through end-to-end support services.

In 2020 (when we were known as “VoteTripling.org”), Vote Rev and VRAF released polling place vote tripling (PPVT) — an in-person relational voter engagement tactic — and trained dozens of partners on it, including the Biden-Harris campaign. Vote Rev’s partners’ 94,000 canvasser-hours of PPVT produced 1,100,000 friend-to-friend reminders to vote – 5x as many as the official Biden campaign app! PPVT was featured in The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.

Since then, we’ve designed and tested other simple and powerful tactics, including site-based vote tripling (SBVT) (formerly known as high-traffic on-the-spot (HTOTS) relational turnout), an in-person, second-generation PPVT done at non-polling place high-traffic sites. In 2022, campaigns and allied organizations using PPVT and SBVT produced 450K relational reminders — and during the 2022 Georgia Senate Runoff, VRAF ran a lightning-fast randomized trial of SBVT that proved its effectiveness at boosting turnout and mobilizing hard-to-reach voters.

In 2024, we’ll boost over ten thousand net votes through Vote Rev’s work mainstreaming these tactics to Democratic campaigns and allied organizations, and VRAF’s work mainstreaming them to nonpartisan civic engagement organizations!

Vote Rev and VRAF are based in Los Angeles, CA, with an additional office in downtown Brooklyn, NY, and employees nationwide. We are dedicated to creating an organization that reflects the diversity of the country we serve. We strongly encourage women, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ people, and others who are underrepresented in campaigns and voter engagement nonprofits to apply.

Given campaign finance restrictions, candidates for this position must possess valid work authorizations, and cannot be foreign nationals. This means that we are legally prohibited from hiring anyone for this position who is not a US citizen, lawful permanent resident (green card holder), or DACA recipient. We are not able to sponsor work visas. By applying to this role, you are acknowledging that you are a U.S. Citizen, DACA recipient, or current Legal Permanent Resident.