In order to protect the health and safety of Nevadans and slow the spread of COVID-19, the Nevada Secretary of State partnered with 17 Nevada counties and moved to conduct a mail-in vote for June’s primary election. The goal of the Mail It In, Nevada campaign was to create awareness of the mail-in election and educate Nevadans on how to cast their vote by mail.
Our objective was to create and launch a campaign that worked to educate, and motivate, registered voters in Nevada. With the changes in our day-to-day lives due to COVID-19, it was important that our campaign connected with our audience in a light-hearted and approachable way. We were able to position our “every day” (albeit exaggerated) voter personas to model the behavior we wanted to encourage—mailing your vote in, the right way—from home.
TV was our medium of choice for our traditional efforts. During this time, TV consumption was increasingly high due to the COVID-19 quarantine. In addition, we sent direct mail pieces to all Democrats and nonpartisan voters 65+ who voted in the last three of four elections to ensure they were aware of the upcoming changes. On digital, we ran display banners, Facebook Ads, and video pre-roll. Overall, this generated over 15 million impressions in a short time span across paid digital and television to ensure our message was received.
Many people on social media were very vocal about their opinions, both negative and positive, on mail-in voting. The campaign’s Twitter efforts also received two boosts: one from Governor Sisolak and the second being the “Trump Bump” which occurred when President Trump mentioned the Nevada primary election was moving to mail-in on May 20. Overall, Facebook and Twitter provided over 300,000 organic impressions over the course of the campaign.
With nearly 150 stories based on proactive media campaign efforts, the campaign and mentions of the primary election reached 11.1 billion unique visitors per month with a total of $20.5 million in publicity value. The PR efforts reached every major Nevada news outlet, rural newspapers, and more. National coverage of our efforts were included in outlets such as NBC News, MSN News, CBS News, the San Francisco Gate, and the Sacramento Bee.
KPS3 reached out to more than 550 influential people, businesses, and organizations in the state of Nevada. We also had 20 organizations that shared information such as the City of Las Vegas, NV Energy, and Reno/Sparks Chamber. KPS3 led and managed the 27 user-generated influencer videos during the campaign to showcase community leaders’ support for mail-in voting. This list included city mayors, former governors, and many large businesses.
mail-in votes (483,788)
in PR publicity value
in negotiated added-value media tic
paid impressions across digital and TV
total media stories across local and national media
user-generated influencer videos
organic Twitter impressions
Facebook impressions
people went to the website over five weeks