Newsroom efforts aim to get more Texans informed about voting and to the polls

This is a series on Better News to a) showcase innovative/experimental ideas that emerge from the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative and b) share replicable tactics that benefit the news industry as a whole. 

This “win” comes from Steven Bruss, assistant managing editor, news; Ashley Slayton, audience development editor; and Leezel Tanglao, assistant managing editor, digital; all of The Dallas Morning News, which participated in the Major Market Table Stakes Program in 2015-16 and received support for some of this work from the American Press Institute as part of the 2024 Election Coverage and Community Listening Fund.

Of the 19.5 million Texans eligible to vote in the 2022 general election, 42% did — a rate 4 points below the national average. A team of Dallas Morning News journalists began researching Dallas-Fort Worth voting rates. We discovered that Texas doesn’t just have a voter registration problem, it has a voter turnout problem. We began to brainstorm ways we could get voters to the polls. Our goals were simple: We wanted to inform people about the voting process and get more people to the polls.

Reaching nonvoters and spurring them to action is not a one-and-done process. Experts say it can take anywhere from seven to 10 interactions to convert a voter from low propensity to actual voting. We knew it would take multiple entry points and approaches to get people to the polls. Moreover, we understood going into election coverage that we weren’t likely to see immediate results from reaching out to this new audience, but that we might see better results in subsequent elections. An additional challenge facing us? How to distinguish any new products from the long-established voter guide, which is a subscriber-only product.

Armed with information, we decided on an umbrella approach focusing on four key areas: personalizing the content to the reader; culturally-tailored content; data-driven enterprise storytelling; and community engagement and feedback.

The strategy worked. Pre-election content resulted in more than 1 million page views and generated over 300 new subscriptions. Social and site videos generated more than 100,000 views.

Here are four highlights from The Dallas Morning News election coverage.

The Dallas Morning News’ Instagram grid offered a three-part interactive journey through voting.

A curated newsletter journey

What we did and why: We polled Dallas voters to learn what information would help them head to the polls with confidence and created a crash course to help voters at the ballot box — Back to the Ballot. Participants had the option to take a short quiz and receive a newsletter tailored to their interests. Our goal was to give Dallas residents the information they need to cast a vote, regardless of their level of prior participation in elections. Using a choose-your-own path newsletter journey, we aimed to meet potential voters where they were with content that was reader-driven and informed by survey results.

For those who had not voted before, we offered a base level of information such as how to register to vote and where to vote. For those who were registered and ready to vote, we offered more information, such as what races to pay attention to if they were interested in a specific issue and who was running. For readers who vote regularly but want to understand the impact of voter apathy and disenfranchisement, we offered enterprise reporting on how voter apathy affects communities and what cities and states are doing to address it.

The newsletter journey had an average click-to-open-rate of 28.5%. We later used this audience as part of a long-term retention play, to continue nurturing and serving this targeted audience. We created an Elections Alert list, separate from our larger Politics list, that we used to connect with readers after the election concluded.

The effort resulted in a healthy audience engagement with an above average open rate – in-line with industry standard CTRs and CTORs. Segmented sends produced more than 100,000 clicks.

What worked well: Centering reader voices. Throughout this process, keeping reader voices central was critical. We wanted to elevate voter voices from all parties in our coverage by engaging the community in a discussion that sought to find differences and commonality around politically divisive issues. Polling from an AP-NORC Center study showed 87% of Americans felt political polarization was a threat to the country. We surveyed the community three times, once in April, once in May (in Spanish), and once in September. All of that feedback was taken into consideration when we developed our election coverage plan.

What didn’t work as expected: The biggest lesson is to plan far ahead. Generating the content was dependent upon the survey. In retrospect, starting much earlier would have allowed us to complete everything sooner. That also could have helped us distinguish the product from our long-running voter guide, which is not an issue-based product. Instead, it offers voters a look at races on the ballot and candidate questionnaires. We also dealt with challenges regarding the logistical means of delivering a personalized journey. And more time would have allowed us to solve for this in a more efficient manner.

Try this:

• Focus on community partnerships, which were key for us. We collaborated with Downtown Dallas Inc., SMU, the Dallas Youth Democracy Committee, the Dallas Mavericks, Klyde Warren Park, Dallas Public Library and Texas Standard to get the word out about the initiative and to reach as many communities as we could.

The Dallas Morning News partnered with a Dallas youth group to record a standup video series stressing the importance of the youth vote, which the News shared on its Instagram Stories.

• Diversify the content. How people get their news has changed drastically. We had a healthy mix of articles, video and social in our approach that catered to the individual platforms. For example, on our Instagram grid we offered a three-part interactive journey through voting; we also partnered with a Dallas youth group to record a standup video series stressing the importance of the youth vote. In contrast, site videos focused on explaining candidates’ platforms.
  

  The Dallas Morning News used CMS features to highlight key articles and crosslink the entire series.

• Provide multiple entry points. We had two promotion strategies. One targeted Back to the Ballot as a whole, encouraging people to take the quiz and receive the customized journey. The second was focused on promoting the individual pieces of content on their own, focusing on which stories might appeal to specific audiences. We also made sure to utilize our CMS features to highlight key articles and crosslink the entire series.

The Elecciones project sought to be a conversation starter around voting and something that can be used during subsequent voting seasons beyond 2024 by using illustrations and cultural cues to make complicated processes more understandable.

Elecciones: A culturally tailored voter guide

What we did and why: Elecciones, the culturally tailored voter guide for the Hispanic community in North Texas, was intended to break down complicated protocols and potential barriers in accessing how to participate in the civic engagement process for this multigenerational community. The goal of this project was to engage with not only the existing Hispanic community from the Al Dia segment, but to also bring in new audiences from this growing demographic through direct in-person outreach and digital promotions. Coupled with using the rich library of content from Al Dia’s archives to help inform how to present the electoral process in a way that’s clear but also fun, this project sought to be a conversation starter around voting and something that can be used during subsequent voting seasons beyond 2024 by using illustrations and cultural cues to make complicated processes more understandable. With Hispanics making up the largest demographic group in Texas with more than 12 million residents according to the Census Bureau, this audience presented an opportunity to serve a readership that has largely been underserved, especially from English language publications.

The Dallas Morning News and Al Dia’s printed culturally tailored voter guides, Elecciones, were left at the Dallas Oak Cliff Municipal Center and other various businesses and locations throughout the greater Dallas area that have a high population of Spanish speakers. (Lorena Flores/Dallas Morning News)

What worked well: Working on this project highlighted how cross-functional and crucial it is to loop in all essential teams early and often. Partnering up with our Al Dia team was key to making this guide a reality and helped to navigate and create what would become the digital offering and printed guide. Involving other parts of the newsroom who did not speak Spanish became a learning opportunity and showed how nuanced projects like this don’t need to be siloed and live with the non-English language team.

What didn’t work as expected: If we could turn back time, what would have been ideal would be starting the ideation process earlier. In the end, we did make our September deadline to launch but having a few extra months would have given the project more time to resonate with readers across not only on digital but through our print guide offering. In addition, finding more time to canvas the key areas for this audience, would have helped to amplify its reach.

Try this: 

• Don’t forget about your non-English speaking audience. We found that our biggest traffic drivers for elections overall were our Spanish-language content. Expand beyond Spanish and look for ways to incorporate other languages such as Vietnamese, Tagalog and any other language that is in your region.
• Remember to involve the community for feedback and let them tell you what questions they have and issues important to them. Due to each community’s intergenerational nature, it can be easy to assume what areas are important but not actually relevant.
• Culturally tailored doesn’t mean just translations. Translations are not enough. Partner with your community to surface and understand their needs and work together to present information in a way that considers platform accessibility (digital, print, audio, etc.).

Polling place audit

What we did and why: Given that our target audience was people who do not vote often, or people who have never voted, we wanted to give them some idea of what to expect when they went to cast a ballot, whether it be in early voting, when most Texans vote, or on Election Day. We also wanted to be sure people knew how to get to the polls, and whether their polling place would be accessible to them. So we recruited our newsroom to attempt to visit every one of the 453 voting locations in Dallas County in a 10-day span, looking at things like access to mass transit, the condition of the parking lots and walkways, and whether people would have to climb stairs to get into the building. We wound up visiting 446 polling places, giving readers a fairly complete look at polling conditions. To Dallas County’s credit, no major or large-scale problems were found.

What worked well: Our newsroom bought into this project. People wanted to participate. We were able to have most folks in the newsroom audit three or four polling places to get it done. We obviously benefited from a large staff, so it made this part of the project easier. We also received more help than I anticipated from some of the agencies that host voting locations, most notably the school districts that were mostly accommodating to our presence on their campuses, though some encouraged us to come on weekends when school was out to avoid disruption. Good relationships forged by our education reporting team surely helped here.

What didn’t work as expected: The presentation was a bit of a challenge. We initially hoped to use Flourish to create an interactive that included a map, with a photo of the entrance of each polling place. Ultimately, we needed to fall back to Plan B, which was a customized Google map. This was less user-friendly than we’d hoped, and we ended up scrapping the photos.

Try this: Obviously we benefited from having a larger newsroom and more people to share the load. For smaller newsrooms, you could ask freelancers to help, encourage people from the community to point out potential problems and then check them out, or narrow down to a specific subset of polling places you want to audit.

Some other tips:

• Open it up to your newsroom (and beyond if your structure allows). You might be surprised at the buy-in you get.
• Come up with a standard language to use in your audit — there’s a difference between some people’s ‘OK’ and others’ ‘Excellent.’ I spent a significant amount of time interpreting what people meant about the condition of a sidewalk.
• Invite the community into the project. Regular voters might know about things you haven’t thought about if they’ve been voting at the same location all their lives.
• Plan ahead. You may have limited time to do this (our polling location list wasn’t finalized until two weeks before the election), so the better prepared you are, the better your chance of success.

This chart shows which issues were important to survey respondents in the 2024 election.

Surveying and community outreach

What we did and why: We started our research by attempting to answer a question, “Why don’t more people vote?” To help us find the answer and to get an idea of how to tailor our elections content, we launched a survey that ran between Q2-Q3. We asked questions like:

• Which issues are important to you in the upcoming election?
• How do you research candidates before elections and where do you obtain your information?
• If you were to contact your elected official, what questions would you ask them?

A few highlights we learned: 35% of respondents cared deeply about border and immigration issues; 46% said women’s reproductive rights were priorities; 44% were focused on education initiatives; and 49% wanted more information about gun legislation. Almost half of the respondents expressed distrust in local and national government. About 3,000 people participated in the survey.

Zaira Perez Viera and Devyani Chhetri attend a community tabling event on April 29, 2024, at Dallas West Branch Library in Dallas, Texas. The Dallas Morning News conducted a community survey to learn more about residents’ interests ahead of the 2024 General Election. (Ashley Slayton/Dallas Morning News)

The survey was distributed via The News’ social media channels, newsletter lists and through a series of community tabling events. We also collaborated with our local public library to conduct extensive surveying at multiple branches across the city. The results were shared with our Politics hub to help us answer key community questions in our pre-election coverage.

In August, we also created a community engagement feedback form asking voters to share with us what they wished voters in other parties understood about them. We featured those responses in our coverage in story form, video form and on social.

What worked well: Get out of the newsroom and into the community. Making sure that the breadth of our community was fully represented was key for us. We leaned heavily on our existing platforms — newsletters, social and in-browser alerts — but we also went to the communities we wanted to reach. Through organized tabling events we were able to get a lot of valuable feedback that the form didn’t allow for.

What didn’t work as expected: The survey was only available in a digital format. In hindsight, it would have been beneficial to also have some sort of print element because many of the people we met struggled with the digital version or did not have access to a computer. The survey also would have benefited from being open for a longer time than the 5-6 weeks it was available.

Try this:

• Group your questions around themes. We grouped our questions for the first survey around three: voter apathy, ballot education and misinformation. This made it easier on the backend to tailor content around answering those questions.
• Make the content available in various formats. We shared the survey on all of our flagship social media accounts, via QR codes we distributed, in newsletters, and provided tablets in person at tabling events.
• Partner with others. We reached out to the League of Women Voters and the Dallas Public Library to help distribute the survey.
• Offer an incentive. Respondents had the opportunity to receive an Amazon gift card for participating and contributing their time.