Postcard vs Letter head to head: Volunteers sent partially handwritten postcards or letters with almost identical content to almost 70,000 potential voters to encourage them to complete and return a voter registration form they received in the mail from Voter Participation Center (VPC). In this study, both letters and postcards resulted in lower voter registration rates (3.87% and 3.91% respectively) than the control condition, where targets received no chase to their voter registration form (4.15%). The decrease in registration rate for folks who received letters was marginally statistically significant compared to controls, but the difference in registration rate between letters and postcards was not statistically significant. Read more here.

Voter Registration Postcarding 2: We followed up on the March 2018 study to see if sending personal postcards to voter registration targets would increase the odds of folks completing their registration. We ran a replication study in September 2018 resulting in marginally significant results. This suggests that chaser postcards did increase the chances of returning the registration form, but that the magnitude of the effect is likely small. The results of the studies suggest that voter registration postcarding shortly after a voter registration effort does provide a reliable, small boost to registration rate. Read more here.

Voter Registration Postcarding: We ran a study in conjunction with Voter Participation Center (VPC) to determine if handwritten postcards help increase registration rates when they accompany voter registration materials. We found that sending handwritten postcards encouraging people to register using the registration form VPC sent them did significantly increase the amount of people who registered. Additionally, we found that postcards received about a week after receiving the form (chaser postcards) increased the registration rate more than postcards received about a week before receiving the form (primer postcards). Read more here.