A project aimed at imagining, creating, and experimenting with behavioral nudges to get young adults to vote.

The challenge of the “1 young person, 1 vote” pro bono project is to imagine, create, and experiment with easy-to-implement behavioral nudges to get young people engaged with the pillar of representative democracy that is voting. The goal of the project is to move young people from merely intending to change the world for the better to actually taking action.

The process was undertaken in three steps: first, come up with ways to progress from mere intention to tangible action; second, create suitable solutions that can easily be implemented; third, conduct experiments to identify which solutions work best.

A co-creation workshop with young adults and researchers was set up during the process, in which we found 15 solutions. Of those, the research team selected five that could be tested in an online experiment. We then set up a statistical power analysis to determine the number of participants needed to identify a statistical effect of the solutions we wanted to test.

Those solutions were tested in a large-scale scientific experiment conducted between April 6 and April 13, 2022.

The solutions

Following the power analysis, we decided to test three alternatives to maximize the chances that our experiment would identify a medium-sized statistical effect. Those three solutions are: “Voting Ambassadors,” “Who’s Voting for You?” and “Polling Place Information.”