We recently connected with Sara Gifford and have shared our conversation below.

Sara, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I grew up knowing that voting was important. My parents used to take us to the polls with them when they voted. Of course that wasn’t difficult as our local polling place was inside my public elementary school. I had practiced the habit of being a regular voter since pre-school, of course only legally casting my first vote after I turned 18.

And then 2016 came around and President Trump was elected. Love him or hate him, what became very clear is that our country was divided. And with that division came increasing polarization. What always struck me was that inside all of that cheer or fear was the fact that while 139 million people voted that year for Trump or Clinton, that meant that over 100 million Americans of voting age did NOT vote. So while the election was close in electoral standards – we will never know what a majority of Americans though because 100 million of them didn’t vote.

So we set out to figure out why. Reading lots of academic research. Listening to political pundits. But most importantly knocking on doors and talking to people. The most enlightening experience happened to my colleague when a woman answered the door and gently but firmly stated that candidates don’t care about voters, they come knocking on doors every few years and ignore their constituents every day in between.

That was the problem we set out to solve. Put voters at the center of the process and not just a tool in the process. Create an empowering piece of technology that helps every voter build that civic habit while ensuring that they do not feel left out or used as part of the process, but rather that the system is there FOR them.

Sara, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

ActiVote is a nonpartisan civic tech platform with the social mission to increase voter participation by empowering every voter to feel informed and confident to participate in every election.

What that means to us:
– Ensure that information is easy to access.
– Ensure that we provide information in an unbiased way.
– Ensure that we help voters feel confident while ensuring that we do not make them uninformed.
– Be there every day, not just election day but every day.
– Be broad beyond just a list of candidates to include information about what is being done by those people FOR the voters.

ActiVote is a free civic tech app for YOU the voter. We are here only for you and our only focus is that you cast your vote each and every time you have the chance.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

ActiVote has three cofounders and we had all worked together at a previous company. One thing that we had all learned through our long journey is that when you find people you work well with find ways to keep working together. It takes time to build the right type of working relationship. You need to learn each others quirks and support each other in the way that each individual needs to be supported. Once you find those relationships, cherish them and they can continue to give back. We have now worked together for decades and at this point there is no stopping us!

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

One of the key parts of ActiVote is helping voters to find the candidates who share their values. If you can answer the question “who believes what I believe?” then that helps one feel empowered to cast their vote. So to enable this feature that means sending out a candidate survey to tens of thousands of candidates every election cycle and getting those candidates to share their views with us.

In business it can be just as important to know what you weak spots are as your strengths. Our founding team has a great deal of strength in technology, but very little in mass marketing. That meant that we hired experts. We worked with political campaign experts and email marketing experts to craft the perfect email program to get candidates to do our survey. We deployed it and waited – and guess what. It didn’t work!

As the expert team was devising the strategy our gut told us that it wasn’t going to work, but we knew that this wasn’t our expertise and we let the expert team we hired continue through their full project. At the end, we thanked them for their time and then deployed a strategy that in our “inexpert” opinion we though was best. We deployed that and waited – and guess what. It worked!

Sometimes in business you need to hire an expert, but you also need to try your own instincts when you feel that expert may be missing something.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://acti.vote/Voyage
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/activoteus/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ActiVoteUS
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/activote/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ActiVoteUS
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@activoteus