These days, it’s not easy to cut through the noise online. But ahead of the 2024 and 2022 elections, HeadCount blew up the internet with a series of innovative voter registration campaigns in collaboration with Sabrina Carpenter, Chappel Roan, Harry Styles, Billie Eilish, and other celebrities. Powered by Impactive's Custom Voter Registration tool, HeadCount captured the attention of a diverse cross-section of the electorate and had a sizeable impact on election turnout, ensuring that over 1 million Americans were ready to vote.
HeadCount is a non-partisan, nonprofit organization that promotes civic engagement through voter registration and education. Due to its creative approach of engaging young voters at music festivals and other popular events, its campaigns are uniquely capable of activating Gen Z to engage in the democratic process. In fact, 78% of people who took action with HeadCount turned out to vote, compared to 65% national turnout.
In the lead-up to the 2024 and 2022 elections, HeadCount needed a tech partner that could collaborate closely with them to meet their needs for a new initiative: Good to Vote. HeadCount’s Good to Vote campaign aims to get young voters ready for Election Day by ensuring that they are registered to vote and have all of the key information they need to show up at the ballot box.
Good to Vote is powered by collaborations with top influencers and celebrities. HeadCount’s voter registration tech platform needed to offer the features and scale necessary to promote these high-visibility partnerships. Impactive has been pleased to work with HeadCount on a customized voter registration tool to supercharge the Good to Vote campaign.
HeadCount launched a series of star-studded giveaways to incentivize voters to check their registration, leveraging Impactive’s gamified Custom Voter Registration functionality. The customizable nature of the voter registration tool allowed HeadCount to create dedicated landing pages for each celebrity-endorsed giveaway. In addition, Impactive’s mobile-friendly registration flow was crucial to HeadCount’s success, as they knew that most voters would enter the giveaway on their phones while at concerts and other live events.
HeadCount launched campaigns in 2022 with a wide range of celebrities, from Harry Styles and Billie Eilish to Stephen Colbert and Amy Schumer. These promotions created a lot of buzz, gaining hits with top media outlets like Billboard and Variety. Each campaign encouraged entrants to check their registration status for a chance to win exciting prizes, like a trip to meet the celebrity or custom-designed merchandise. Most importantly, participants could gain extra chances to win by referring three friends to check their registration statuses (via a personalized referral link), leveraging the proven concept of action tripling to drive more impact.
The relational organizing component of these sweepstakes is key. HeadCount found that relational prompts (friends inviting friends to participate, via their personalized referral link) generated a 10-15% increase in action-taking compared to other forms of sweepstakes promotion. That’s particularly important from HeadCount’s perspective, because relational prompts are not only higher-quality, but also meaningfully cheaper than paying for paid social media ads or other promotions to expand the reach of social media posts from celebrities.
Aiming to build on their previous success, HeadCount launched new Good to Vote campaigns in 2024, featuring high-profile artists like Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan. Carpenter’s campaign proved especially impactful, generating over 35,000 voter registrations, HeadCount’s most successful campaign of the 2024 cycle. Furthermore, HeadCount was able to take advantage of Impactive’s all-in-one platform to run peer-to-peer texting campaigns targeted at fans who had signed up for specific artists for further registrations. For example, HeadCount sent texts that referenced Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan lyrics, like “Hey it's [NAME] with HeadCount, we're texting Sabrina Carpenter fans before 11/05. Leave quite an impression (by VOTING to be exact!). What’s your voting plan this year?”
HeadCount’s 500+ Good to Vote promotions across multiple cycles demonstrated unprecedented conversion rates of up to 70%, resulting in almost 1.7 million voter registrations via Impactive. Over 50,000 entrants checked their registration through the Harry Styles promotion alone. These viral campaigns also significantly expanded HeadCount’s reach, growing their messaging list to over 400,000 subscribers.
The success of HeadCount’s Good to Vote initiative highlighted the power of virtual voter mobilization and is a prime example of cultural and technological innovation in civic engagement.
In 2025 and 2026, HeadCount will continue to use Impactive to engage voters nationwide. Impactive is excited to collaborate with HeadCount to demonstrate that authentic civic engagement work happens year in and year out with creative, buzzy, relational-oriented digital campaigns.
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