The YouTube community is famous for organizing movements, commenting, liking, and disliking. Yet, despite this digital activism, they're the least likely demographic to vote. VoteIRL asked millennials to put down their phones and vote in real life. But to vote, you have to be registered. We discovered it takes an average of 1m34s to register to vote.

So rather than feed scripts to celebrities, we focused on building entertaining prompts and creative tools for the YouTube community to create empowering messages themselves. We activated creators with a simple prompt: "Film yourself doing anything you want for 1m34s while your viewers register to vote." Over 211 videos were created by YouTubers and celebrities including The Rock and Conan, earning 7M total views. As a final push we recorded a special video with President Obama, urging our community to get out and vote in real life.

On September 20th, 2016, #voteIRL launched a week before National Voter Registration Day. Using this as our anchor, we galvanized YouTubers & celebrities to upload their ‘Register to Vote in 1:34’ videos in the weeks leading up to state registration deadlines.

Our campaign went live across multiple properties:

Influencer YouTube Channels - Influencers posted 1:34 videos to their channels and social, 7M total views.

YouTube Spotlight Channel - posted a 1:34 compilation video and various celebrity videos (Cher, West Wing cast) to our own channel (26M subscribers)

YouTube Social Handles - combined 182M+ followers, posted influencer videos, custom content, and did a channel art takeover.

YouTube Homepage & In-App Promos - homepage placement & in-app promos garnered 280M impressions (over half the population of the U.S.)

On November 7, we launched our Obama voting PSA as an extra push to get our audience to vote in real life, 3M views.

This was YouTube’s most successful direct-to-creator video prompt ever, over 211 top YouTubers and celebrities participated (Cher, Ryan Seacrest, The Rock, Conan, Chainsmokers). We successfully activated creators with our open prompt, instead of a typical scripted PSA. The #voteIRL videos on YouTube received over 7M combined views.

We generated 24k social mentions and 2.4B total organic impressions, with over 43% of our impressions came from our target demographic (18-24 yr olds).

While the outcome of the U.S. election was...surprising, more millennials registered & voted than ever before. Our campaign shortlink (http://g.co/elections/134) alone drove 2M clicks through to online registration tools. In 2016, a record breaking 83% of millennials were registered to vote and 30% more millennials actually voted compared to 2012. And they’ll still be registered in 2020 :)

We had 70+ press stories including Teen Vogue, Mashable, and The View (2.7M viewers).

YouTube creators are the masters of online video, maintaining channels that entertain millions. On occasion, these disparate creators & entertainers unite under specific prompts like Mannequin or 100 Layers challenge. For the Elections, YouTube developed an original prompt for Creators to convince their fans to register to vote in 1m34s, doing whatever task that felt right to them. #voteIRL’s 1:34 message stripped away the canned ‘get out the vote’ message you see in many celebrity campaigns, and instead empowered Creators to entertain their fans in their own unique voice, all while communicating the simplicity of voter registration.

To define YouTube’s unique role in driving young voter turnout, we looked for insights in three key areas: the YouTube community, the elections landscape, and cultural trends. We saw that there were already YouTubers, with thousands to millions of young fans, who deeply cared about the elections. Given the increasingly negative tone of the elections season, we saw an opportunity to empower those YouTubers and use them as catalysts to spark turnout in a positive way.

Through social listening we found a +34% MoM increase in negativity & voter fatigue in months before election, creating an opportunity for a more lighthearted voting message. Along with that, adding a social challenge call-to-action, we could create a sense of urgency and action.

Utilizing influential YouTubers and celebrities we developed a light-hearted, challenge-oriented message during two key moments: National Registration Day and Election Day to create a movement that socialized the vote.

Knowing that the US Presidential Election would be a major cultural moment in 2016 and that voter turnout had decreased to abysmal levels. YouTube wanted to help spark change and empower the voices of YouTubers & celebrities, along with the millennials who follow them.

- Only 1 in 3 millennials voted in 2012.

- In 2016, 50% of unregistered voters were millennials.

- 2016 is the first election where millennials will outnumber baby boomers.

YouTube’s objective was to increase the levels of new voter registration and election day turnout for the 2016 election. We aimed to reach 50% of U.S. millennials.