Based on the extensive experience of campus and community partners, we’ve developed guides to how you can most effectively distribute or promote our guides to your constituencies:
All organizations and individuals are welcome to link to our guides on our website or print them out to distribute. We ask that you use our guides in a nonpartisan way. If you’d like to co-brand, please contact us for permission. The more parallel ways you distribute the guides, the more they’ll become a key part of people’s decisions whether to vote and who to vote for. You may shorten a guide if you want to focus on core issues, but please keep the original questions and answers for the topics you choose to use.
We’ll also be supplying plug-and-play social media images created by Taskforce.us, whose images have 50 billion views.
guides.vote provides partner organizations non-partisan, expertly researched candidate guides free of cost. These guides help potential voters learn where candidates stand, so they can go to the polls with confidence. Our team of researchers, writers, and editors comb through candidate statements, voting records, websites, endorsements, and other credible sources to provide concise and trustworthy comparisons of candidate positions on multiple important issues.
We encourage partners to promote and distribute the resulting nonpartisan guides, whether electronically or in printed form (we’re hoping to offer mini-grants to help with the latter). Partners can also take our questions and answers and co-brand them in their own preferred format – see requirements below. We do the heavy lifting, allowing our partners to provide trusted guides to their networks.
“Miami Dade College’s 160,000 students represent their communities. Most both work and go to school, are the first in their families to go to college, and face major socioeconomic challenges. These non-partisan guides break down candidate stands in ways that are credible and easy to understand. They’re an invaluable and essential part of helping our students understand issues and candidates, giving them the confidence to become informed voters.“
— Josh Young, Director MDC Institute for Civic Engagement and Democracy
From the feedback we get, the guides are enormously helpful for voters who feel they don’t have enough trustworthy information about the candidates, or who feel overwhelmed by all the confusing claims and counterclaims. We hope you’ll integrate them into your voter engagement efforts.
When people don’t vote, it’s often because they don’t know where the candidates stand, and mistrust politics in general. “I don’t know enough,” they say. “All the ads, all the lies, you can’t believe what the candidates say, and I don’t want to vote for the wrong person.” “If I only knew what they actually stood for….”
Since 2012, guides.vote has offered an antidote, publishing fair, nonpartisan, and meticulously sourced candidate guides for major U.S. elections. We originally created the guides for students at hundreds of college campuses, under the auspices of Campus Election Engagement Project. Our campus partners consistently called these guides their favorite resource, saying they were crucial not only in helping students decide who to vote for, but whether to vote at all. In recent years, major civic engagement groups have also begun embracing them, from American Democracy Project and Black Voters Matter to Do Something, Nonprofit Vote, Vote.org, Youth Service America, and When We All Vote. We’ll create guides for all the major 2022 races, in English and Spanish.
Partners appreciate how the guides dig deep into candidate stands, instead of just cutting and pasting from candidate websites. The editorial team creating the guides is led by a former Business Week Boston bureau chief and Los Angeles Times Tokyo reporter and includes a 19-year senior editor and manager at Encyclopedia Britannica. The guides are researched and written by former reporters for Time, the Associated Press, Toronto Globe & Mail, Seattle Times, and similar outlets.
Groups who’ve distributed or promoted guides.vote guides, in addition to over 400 college campuses: