The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Behaviour change ~ History of the ‘I Voted’ sticker
Today we look, in our Behaviour Change section, at the history of the ‘I Voted’ sticker in US politics. What does this tell us about persuasion?
And of course, there’s Charlie’s Attic, the bumper sticker appended to our Weekly gas guzzler. This week we mourn the closure of Britain’s oldest fake airport.
With the US mid-terms last week, we enjoyed this piece on the history of the ‘I Voted’ badge in the US. The article looks at the origins of the sticker, which acts as a sign of positive civic participation for American electors.
The author speaks to Claire Jerry for the piece, a political history curator at the Smithsonian Institution, who describes the sticker’s evolution. For Americans among our readership, the examples of ‘I Voted’ badges from past elections will perhaps be a trip down memory lane.
Jerry initially downplays the role of the stickers in turnout, stating that “I don’t think it mobilises people to go vote anymore – I don’t know if we could ever measure if it actually had that effect.” But she adds that, “I do hear parents talking about taking their children with them to vote and then sharing their sticker with their child, so I wonder if it’s a way of saying ‘let’s get future generations thinking about voting’.” This is interesting, as an example of how a minor initiative can become a tradition passed down the generations.
Underpinning the ‘I Voted’ sticker is one of the oldest behaviour change techniques available – that of creating a identity people want to be part of, around an everyday activity. It has become mainstream in Get Out The Vote (GOTV) campaigns, which often stress that ‘turnout will be high’ or ‘the whole street is voting’. And it is the dream of many brands, who hope that using their product will become something people are – rather than just something they do.
The ‘I Voted’ sticker is at one level is incredibly simple. But it still carries a major lesson for social marketeers, who are looking to embed positive behaviours and enact social change.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the stuffed ballot at the end of our fiesta of apathy:
