Monthly Message From the Executive Director
Jackie Payne (she/her) is the founder and executive director of Galvanize Action, where she is connecting with moderate women to promote civic engagement, combat disinformation, and advance progress on key issues. Last year alone, Galvanize Action reached over four million women with programming proven to defuse the culture wars and grievance-based narratives being used to divide us. Jackie’s innovative leadership supports women to play a role in building a thriving, multiracial democracy.
March
Friends,
Happy first day of spring! As the sun starts to return to us, it’s the perfect time to reflect on how much we have to feel hopeful about, even in these frightening times. Here’s a big one: we have exciting new evidence that Galvanize Action’s approach worked to move moderate white women toward progress last year. Our work—and your tireless, generous support—really made a difference!
Last year, Galvanize Action (in conjunction with my nonconnected PAC the One For All Committee) ran a county-level field experiment in Nebraska to test the effectiveness of our programming. We used matched-pairs design, which means similar counties were paired up using demographic factors like the percent of white women living there and the county’s average ideology, education, and income scores. People in one county would see our ads, people in a similar control country would be blocked from seeing those ads.
When we compare election results in treatment counties against control counties, we see that Democratic vote choice increased by 0.5pp, which is incredible! We did not expect to see such significant movement in this crowded election year—this is an outstanding result and it’s something to celebrate!
Our programming also increased turnout among moderate white women (+3.1pp) and among Nebraska voters overall (+2pp). Once again, where Galvanize Action worked, we saw statistically significant strides toward a healthy democracy.
And of course, that’s on top of the earlier evidence we shared from our 2024 Tracking Survey & Randomized Controlled Field Trial. This award-winning experiment showed that our ads (and our partner’s!) successfully moved white women toward progress on the economy, which was consistently their most important civic issue. This approach works.
Galvanize Action and Galvanize USA’s work is not done yet—safeguarding our democracy from authoritarian threats has never been more important. That’s why this year, we’ll continue to:
- Focus on the economy to help women see who has their family’s back and reduce the tendency to blame “the other” for economic hardships.
- Strengthen democratic norms and ideals, reinforcing the basic building blocks of our democracy.
- Build social cohesion and a sense of shared fate. If we can decrease othering, we can defuse a key tactic of the authoritarian playbook.
- Scale our impact by expanding our subscriber base, reaching new audiences in the media ecosystem, and sharing what works with the broader movement—making our efforts even more cost-effective and far-reaching.
That’s what we’re good at, that’s what Galvanize Action and Galvanize USA have been doing for about seven years now, and now is the time to scale up! Please join us as we rapidly grow our presence in the new media ecosystem through programming like Galvanize Together and Dear Grace. This ongoing solution will continue to bring us closer to an America that truly works better for everyone!
For even more details about 2024 research, our collective impact, and how the new media ecosystem is shaping up, please join me next week for our first event of the year. Can’t wait to see you there!
Jackie Payne