Principles and values

• We have spent a lot of time thinking about what we value and what things to take on and how we get them done – aka The VoteAmerica Way. While we may look at being more succinct in the future, these are the things we keep repeating internally and the things we use to drive things forward.

• These values capture our approach to teamwork, to problem solving, to decision making, and to goal setting. We are at our absolute best as a team when we adhere to our values. So when we wrote them down, we literally asked ourselves, “what were we doing when we were at our best?”

• Relatedly, we use these values to screen applicants. If these values resonate strongly with you, you’ll love working at VoteAmerica. If not, working here will be a total drag.

• If you’re looking for an amazing framework in general, check out the Extreme Programming (XP) values. Extreme Programming was designed to facilitate software development, but it’s a great framework for any project.

Be goal-oriented, tactic-agnostic.

• This is our most important value, and the things that sets us apart from so many other organizations and companies.

• Our goal is to increase voter turnout. If the data showed that carrier pigeons were the best way to increase turnout, we would become experts in the care and maintenance of pigeons.

• We focus on the goal, and we adopt and abandon tactics based on their effectiveness, and we define effectiveness as the measurable impact they have on increasing turnout.

• Every action should be in pursuit of a goal. If you don’t have a reason for doing something, don’t do it.

Get 1% better every day.

• If you get 1% better every day, you’ll be 3678.343% better in one year. (Or we can just say you’ll be 37x better in one year.). Even if you improve only 0.1% per day, you’d be 44% better by the end of the year.

• We say this often as a way of reminding ourselves that (a) we’re constantly getting better, (b) that this is a wonderful thing to strive for, (c) that it’s ok to not be great at something right now because you’ll be so much better at this in 365 short days, and that (d) we can’t fix everything at once, but if we’re steady with our progress we will see really impressive results.

• Related: we often say “make new mistakes.” Which means that it’s totally, 100% cool to do something boneheaded, but don’t do the same boneheaded thing often.

Keep it simple, remove complexity

• We’re drawing heavily from Extreme Programming here: treat every problem as if the solution is extremely simple. We choose simple solutions because they save time, and money, and headache.

• Barely sufficient is still sufficient.

• The more we build, the more we need to maintain, the more work we create for ourselves in the long run. This value is harder than it seems at first. You’ll realize you did work you didn’t need to do, or that you created a system that’s entirely too complex. That’s ok: remove everything extraneous until only the essentials are left. The voters will thank you.

• “What is the simplest thing that could possibly work?” Kent Beck.

Solve today’s problem, not tomorrow’s

• I’m borrowing this one from Extreme Programming (XP), my favorite software development framework.

• Predicting the future is difficult and costly, therefore XP suggests teams should only solve today’s problems today, and consider tomorrow’s problems tomorrow. 

• Here’s how this plays out for us. There are an unlimited number of things that we “might” work on. We might one day translate the site into Swahili. But we also might not. So rather than build in support of localization from the start, which would have slowed us down considerably in 2020 and likely kept us from launching, we decided that everything would just be in English and we would deal with localization if and when it happened. Four years later, this hasn’t really come up. And if it does come up, we’ll deal with it then, since we communicate frequently and we re-evaluate regularly.

• We realize that simply solving today’s problems today, and solving theoretical problems down the line, might create more work in the future. That’s ok. We accept that risk. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there — IF we get there.

• When deciding what to work on, recognize that the word “might” is flag. Pause, take a step back, and focus on the work that you are 100% certain needs to get done. There is more than enough work that we absolutely need to tackle to spend any time or energy on anything else.

• So this is me (Debra) giving you explicit permission to choose the simplest solution to today’s problem, even if that solution might create headaches in the future.

Buy, don’t build.

• If an entire company exists to provide a service, buy, don’t build. We build voter engagement software: we buy everything else. We’re not here to develop expertise in anything beyond increasing turnout.

• Related: The cheapest way to solve problems is often with money. It’s really easy to drive yourself crazy trying to solve a problem without spending money. But time and time again we find that throwing money at a problem is often the

Be wildly ambitious and relentlessly pragmatic.

• This is basically the VoteAmerica Way. It’s why our small team can punch so far above our weight.

• It’s seemingly contradictory, and that’s what makes it awesome. VoteAmerica’s goals are blindingly ambitious (mobilize every college student) while our solutions are relentlessly pragmatic (full page ads in every college newspaper).

• This means we seek solutions that are fast to implement and easy to scale. Whenever possible, we find solutions that scale with capital and not labor.

Be data-informed, not data-driven.

• Data, like most things, is subject to bias. Historical data shows that young people and people of color (POC) vote at lower rates than older, whiter voters. It would be easy — and wrong — to conclude that they don’t want to vote. VoteAmerica concluded instead that young voters and POC don’t vote because they are chronically neglected voters. So we use the data to inform us, but we don’t use the data to drive our decisions.

Execute with a sense of urgency.

• We have a shared sense of urgency at VoteAmerica, and this causes us to value expediency over almost everything else.

• We never, ever miss deadlines because Election Day doesn’t move. This means that scope might change, but the deadline will not. This encourages us to be ruthless with prioritization, and to remind ourselves frequently that we’re going to solve today’s problem today, and worry about tomorrow’s problem tomorrow.

• This also means we’re open to solving problems with money, because time is our most precious and constrained commodity.

Assume the best.

• Life is easier if you assume good intentions. So we assume the best of each other, and other groups in the voter turnout space, and most importantly, of the voter.

• Internally this means that we recognize that people don’t fail, processes fail. If a team member is floundering, something went wrong in one of our processes (recruiting, screening, onboarding, goal-setting, managing, etc.).

• Externally this means that we reject outright that low voter turnout is due to apathy. This is a form of victim blaming and serves primarily to obscure that it is is harder to vote in the US than in any other country with democratically-elected leadership. Once you recognize that citizens want to vote, you can focus on effective ways to increase turnout.

Challenge conventional wisdom.

• Conventional wisdom tells us that voter registration will always produce larger increases in turnout in presidential years than GOTV campaigns. This statement was issued sometime in 2014, and now is accepted dogma. Hundreds of millions of dollars are invested in voter registration campaigns based on this wisdom. Which would be fine if the statement wasn’t wrong.

• Sure, if you compare the single most effective voter registration tactics to the single least effective GOTV tactic, then voter registration will always outperform. But that’s a silly way to go through life.

• Many things have changed since 2014. 25 states now have same day registration, which eliminates the need for summer and fall-based voter registration drives. 25 states have automatic voter registration, which means that the majority of citizens will be registered to vote as soon as they interact with a state-based government agency. And these are just two pro-voter reforms that have happened since 2014.

• We deliver exceptional results because we question dogma. We can’t deliver a better future if we live in the past.

• I found a great quote on this: "Yesterday’s solutions will not solve today’s problems."

We are here to deliver results.

• VoteAmerica’s mission is to increase voter turnout and to make the electorate accurately reflect the population in terms of racial, gender, and economic diversity. If we’re not increasing turnout, then we’re not doing our jobs. Our steadfast devotion to the mission means that we need to hold ourselves to a consistently high standard, and we need to be willing to change and adapt when something isn’t working. The mission is more important than our egos, than a funder’s ego, than our desire to play around with something new or fancy.

• The focus on results means that sometimes we need to make difficult decisions. That’s ok, and it’s to be expected at a high-performance organization.