Our objective for this project was to increase voter participation by 2% from the 2014 election. Due to the diversity of our audience we required multiple touch points to reach the various segments of our population. We launched a cross-platform strategy that included vinyl, transit ads, targeted Google and social ads, a website takeover of a local news site, print ads, and ‘I voted’ stickers. Our message was simple, and focused on the key details, the election date and website. We knew for audience recall that excessive content would dilute message.
We developed an original wordmark to emphasize the impartiality of the campaign from the Town’s brand, and to differentiate incumbents from candidates.
Milton has a young, diverse and educated population. As one of Canada’s fastest growing communities, our demographics have changed rapidly and so has the visual identity of the community. We understood early the importance of representing the population in collateral, but did not have visuals that representative of the population. We would have preferred to feature our residents where possible, however due to budget constraints needed to use stock photography. To maintain consistency, the models and backgrounds were edited to maintain a common tonal value.
We wanted to ensure there were no constraints to participate in the election so accessibility was of utmost importance. Messaging was kept intentionally short placing emphasis on key information and dates. A proper contrast ratio was maintained between copy and background for legibility.
MiltonVotes ran a website takeover on the local news website as well as a social campaign to target residents.
The campaign was successful on all fronts. Foremost, voter turnout increased by 3.66%. Facebook events reached almost 41,000 people, exceeding our target of 30,000 and Twitter engagement surpassed our goal by 1,000 engagements.
Voters loved the takeaway stickers and wore the stickers proudly, sharing photos across social media platforms and encouraging their friends to do the same. #MiltonVotes went viral, driving voters to the poles on election night.
