DCCC Virtual
Action Center
WEB DESIGN PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Web design for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “one-stop shop” for remote voter engagement and digital mobilization in the face of COVID-19.
BACKGROUND
Soon after it became clear to Democratic leadership that the pandemic would likely have a significant impact on organizing leading up to the 2020 election, DCCC’s digital mobilization and creative teams were tasked by leaders in the Democratic Party with the challenge of designing and launching what would become the DCCC’s Virtual Action Center—in less than two months.
Final prototype of the Virtual Action Center.
CHALLENGE
I needed to consolidate a lot of ideas from our mobilization, field, comms, and political teams, as well as the top of Democratic Party leadership to make a cohesive, usable product—all while coping with a new pandemic reality myself, and in less than two months after our country’s pandemic response began in March 2020.
The shared goal across the Democratic landscape was to protect the party’s majority in Congress as we entered the final days of the Trump administration. But stakeholder demands within the DCCC and Democratic Congressional leadership were far more granular. Pitched as a “one-stop shop,” the Virtual Action Center needed to include:
Virtual volunteer opportunities to mobilize Democratic voters leading up to a critical, extended GOTV season due to the projected expansion of vote-by-mail practices across the country;
Toolkits for digital mobilization;
Boost the DCCC’s candidates on its Frontline (vulnerable incumbents) and Red to Blue (promising challengers) programs;
Opportunities for digital engagement and micro-influencing in voters’ immediate circles;
Showcase the committee’s increased commitment to reaching diverse voters in their native language; and, of course,
A clear CTA to donate money to the DCCC.
APPROACH
Starting with a rough sketch from our mobilization director, I created a single-page stacked layout with top dashboard-style navigation in the form of hyperlinked icons that jumped down to their corresponding sections.
TAKE ACTION: Tiled links to sign up for in-language volunteer opportunities in over 20 different languages, virtual events, and opportunities in the DCCC’s most important race at the time (CA-25’s special election, just one month away).
FIND A CAMPAIGN NEAR YOU: A search tool to help users determine which of the DCCC’s most critical races were nearby. I collaborated with our developers to come up with creative solutions to UX concerns I had — I was particularly obsessed with making sure every single person in the country would get relevant “find a campaign near you” results, for instance, testing several methods for calculating distance and defining conditional logic to account for an extremely varied range in geographical size of ZIP codes and Congressional districts.
VIRTUAL EVENTS: A Google map API on the left showing each of the DCCC’s competitive Frontline (Democratic-held) and Red-to-Blue (Republican-held) campaigns, linked to a CSV containing candidate and campaign information that I compiled with the mobilization team. On the right, an iframe containing a listing of these campaigns’ various volunteer opportunities as listed on Mobilize.us (a DCCC partner).
SHARE YOUR STORY: A digital engagement feature utilizing an existing DCCC partnership with Countable, a content-creation tool focused on helping people become micro-influencers for important causes within their personal social-media networks. This panel of the VAC launches a modal using Countable’s API to walk the user through steps to record a video about what motivates them to vote and post it on their social networks. The tiled background is composed of screenshots of real videos that have been submitted to the DCCC through Countable.
The site has since been redesigned under the guidance of a new creative director for a new electoral landscape, but my team’s 2020 design can be seen in the screenshots on this page and in this early-draft Adobe XD prototype.
RESULTS
The site went live without a hitch in time for an ABC News exclusive that started driving traffic to the VAC. Meanwhile, the digital fundraising and digital comms teams coordinated a successful national campaign to announce the new VAC to the DCCC’s text and email subscribers, for which the creative team developed supporting email and MMS graphics in English and in Spanish with my art direction.
The VAC achieved all internal committee goals, but more importantly contributed to the wider party’s goals of mobilizing voters and keeping the House under Democratic control through the turbulent conclusion of the 2020 election.
