And, we're seniors.

This has been a really busy semester for Team Vote-CP. There's just been so much going on that the time just literally flew by. So here's a few updates on what's been going on for us:

In March, we attended the IMPACT conference, held at Northeastern University. It's a conference on student service, advocacy, and social action, and (in my opinion), it was an extremely rewarding experience. While the main focus of our research is centered around the University of Maryland, one of our goals is to assess how well our research would apply to other schools or in other places around the country. The conference gave us a great chance to talk to people from different backgrounds who were interested in our topic and see what is going on at other schools, as well as to find out whether the attitudes we discovered from our focus groups were farther-reaching. We learned a lot about methods that other people are using to reach out to youth voters. But more importantly, we learned a couple of key points that consistently get voters out and keep them interested. The first thing was the importance of peer-to-peer contact: approaching someone in person is much more effective than electronic or mechanized outreach (like form emails or pre-recorded phone messages). Also, in order to keep youth participation up, it is important that we, as a society, make civic engagement a part of everyday life once again, rather than letting it continue to be something that comes up once every few years. Overall, the focus that we gained was on sustainable engagement--making sure that whatever we do, it does more than just work now, it keeps working in the future.

After we came back from the conference, we got word back from the IRB: our survey had been approved for distribution. Yay us! So we uploaded our survey on surveymonkey.com, and for the months of April and May we sent out the link to everyone we could, asking that they take the survey. We also got paper copies printed and distributed those in classes and outside the dining hall on campus. All in all, we got almost 1000 surveys filled out. A couple of weeks ago, we sat down as a team and looked at the results and found two major trends. First, students want easier access to information on the candidates. This, we anticipated, for the most part. The other trend we saw kind of surprised me. Over 70% of the students we surveyed told us they were registered to vote at their home address. In retrospect, this makes sense, since most people I know registered in their high schools in assemblies and the like. But the reason this surprised me is because sooooo many GOTV efforts I've seen since getting to UMD have focused on re-registering voters at their College Park addresses. Anyway, based on this we developed our tactic for next semester!

Now, as finals have come to an end and everyone's moving home for the summer or getting into the groove of their internships, we've got a couple of (super-important) things to get done. First, we've gotta work the kinks out of the tactic we're planning on. Also, we're applying for additionally funding so we can actually implement the tactic. Third, we've got to re-apply to everyone's favorite, IRB, to make sure we can actually do the research.

Anyway, that's the update on this semester. We're all hyper-excited for the fall, when the really FUN part of our experiment happens. See you then for more updates!