Organizing Toolkit

Tools and Resources for Grantees

Down-Ballot Voter Guide Resources

GIS MAPPING Resource

CaPA produces maps of competitive districts from state legislative level all the way up to President to identify nested areas of investment that have multiple competitive races on a single ballot. Find and review our current competitive district map here.

Center for Common Ground built a map with VA voter registration locations and county satellite locations for early voting. 

Vote.Org

We work with Vote.org to provide our partners with high quality voter participation tools.

Relational Organizing Tools

SwipeBlue is a free, innovative relational organizing app for groups to help their friends register and vote. SwipeBlue allows you to match your phone contacts with the voter file, so that your organizing program can focus on contacting your priority audiences such as likely Democrats.  With SwipeBlue, users and their organizations can easily track the number of messages sent. Organizations can also upload custom scripts to match the goals of their program, including links to voter registration or turnout information portals (the standard, preset voter registration tool at SwipeBlue is BallotReady). To get started, click here to download SwipeBlue. Feel free to direct any questions about how to use the app to rally young voters to Lubinmaxwell@gmail.com.

Empower offers a free relational organizing tool and free training for non-profit organizations. This resource does not target likely Democratic voters in your contact list like Swipe Blue so can be used by both c3 and c4 entities.

Blue Wave Postcard Movement

Blue Wave Postcard Movement (BWPM) is a grassroots, women-led, nonprofit that mobilizes hard-to-reach voters in swing states with custom postcards. Their postcards include QR codes for election info, self-stick address labels, and personal messages. Blue Wave’s postcard kits are provided to grassroots groups at cost and are an easy way to spin up a professional and effective mail program if you have volunteers to add handwritten messages. Review 2023 Postcard Kits

Open Source Digital Ads

We Make the Future provides professional messaging and videos on a variety of topics utilizing a Race Class Narrative. They produced canned unbranded social media video content to which you can attach your organization’s logo prior to distributing. They provide technical support, and in some cases financial support, to assist you in reaching your audience.

Tools and Resources for Grantees

In addition to funding, CaPA aims to provide our partners with resources, guides, mentorship, and connections behind the scenes so they can focus more of their energy on the work. We encourage new grantees to self-identify non-financial resources that could help them be more successful and then develop appropriate offerings as able. Below are some suggested resources for new grantees to consider requesting.

 

  • Relational organizing (training volunteers to reach out to their friends and family instead of cold calling/texting strangers about issues and actions)
    • Help from our team to determine if relational organizing is right for your organization
    • Get connected and set up with the free relational organizing Empower app and their training and support services 
  • Messaging
    • Support with writing and editing outreach scripts, emails, etc.
    • Information about research and polling on effective messaging strategies
  • Legislative advocacy
    • Coaching on how to develop and advocate for policy in your state legislature
    • Resources and examples of bills
  • Development assistance
    • Raising awareness and offering assistance with applications to non-CaPA grants
    • Introduction to donor tables, and other major donors
  • Public Relations
    • Assistance developing press releases highlighting your individual organization and efforts
  • Mapping
    • Help with identifying strategic and competitive local elections in your state(s)
    • Locating and mapping early voting and polling locations
  • Web development assistance
    • Help integrating voter registration widgets or new functionality into your website
  • Engagement guides
    • Our team researches and publishes guides based on our partners’ needs and requests. Past guides include strategies for safe and effective protesting, sample Covid safety policies, and voter education guides
  • Connections to partners
    • Connections with other CaPA partner and grantee organizations to explore opportunities for collaborations and share ideas and knowledge
    • Regular partner coalition calls to connect all grantee organizations together
  • Organizational mentorship
    • Strategic consulting for any questions you have about growing and sustaining your organization or determining your goals and tactics
  • Enhanced tracking
    • Develop protocols and resources to better track your organization’s actions and outcomes

Below Review Past CaPA Toolkit Offerings In Response to Specific Grantee Requests

Organizing and Engagement Guides

Our team researches and publishes guides based on our partners’ needs and requests. Please let us know if you have an idea for a new guide.

Safe Protesting Guide
Street protests are powerful tools for change and an essential part of our democracy, but it’s vital to know how to keep yourself and your people as safe as possible. CaPA has prepared this guide of steps to take and resources to use to protest safely and effectively.

Messaging Guide for Youth Voters in Rural and Suburban Areas

More than 30 million youth (ages 18–39) live in rural and suburban areas. These voters can make all the difference in close elections, but they have lower voting rates and are often ignored by politicians and campaigns. 

CaPA has completed extensive research into the undecided and infrequent young voters, who live in small towns and suburbs. Though they lean “green,” this segment of young voters are less sure about voting and are less partisan than youth in urban areas. We call this segment the “Ambivalent Young Voters.” We’ve tested a bunch of messages and strategies for getting this group of young voters motivated to take action and packaged up our findings into two helpful guides. The Youth Messaging Guidebook provides an in-depth explanation of the messages and strategies that we found work best on Ambivalent Young Voters, and the Youth BattleCard condenses key themes into a mobile-format, perfect for advocates to operationalize in the field.

District Specific Climate Messaging Resources

Climate Cabinet knows that climate change will be a defining issue for the policymakers competing in Georgia’s runoff elections. Climate Cabinet’s Activism Toolkit provides grassroots organizations and candidates with climate talking points, messaging, and platforms tailored to every Congressional district in Georgia. 

The Abrams Playbook

For on the ground organizing strategies and tactics specific to Georgia – We recommend that you check out Stacey Abrams’ playbook on winning Georgia, which she and Fair Fight used to register an estimated 800,000 new voters since 2018.

Boost Your Social With Motivating Content

Send us your engaging social media content and we will post it to this toolkit resource. We also love to receive photos from field activities which can be posted to this Georgia Google Photos Drive. Please add your contact information within the title of the image so a press contact can quickly get a hold of you if they want to learn more about the photo. Additionally, check out Vote.org’s video PSA scripts and social media toolkit

We have also generated a useful Georgia Runoff Social Media kit, which you can access here

How to Vote in the Georgia Runoff 

Georgia Climate Project