Pulso

Sustained growth on any digital media platform is extremely difficult to achieve. Even more so if you're a non-profit platform like Pulso seeking to increase civic engagement. My team has a proven track record as digital organizers. We were able to achieve outsized impact during the 2020 elections with our efforts on Pulso to register people to vote, help people vote-by-mail and participate in the elections. 

Where we could use added capacity is in our digital media growth hacking prowess. As a young start-up, with non-profit status, our salaries are not comparable to the private sector. We are not competitive when it comes to hiring people with vast media experience because our salaries are much lower than what the media market offers.

I would use the Elevate Prize funding to hire a digital media video producer and growth hacker. Those roles are essential to scale our growth in the next phase of Pulso. We aim to reach 10 million Latinos by the 2024 elections and to do that we have to grow exponentially in the next three years. If awarded the Elevate Prize we would be able to competitively recruit talent from the digital media world and achieve that.

I am a Venezuelan American from South Florida. I was raised by a single mother who passed away 8 years ago. At 24, I was left to figure out the system on my own. Because of that hardship, I feel a responsibility to help the Latinx community in the United States vote for our interests and hold our leaders and institutions accountable.

My organization, Pulso, is a non-profit digital media start up reaching more than 2 million Latinos in the US via digital platforms with the mission of increasing my community's political power. We do this by creating news, history and culture stories that our people love. This digital relationship is what we then leverage for political action off the screen.

My vision is that by 2050, Pulso will have been a catalyst in transforming the US elections systems. By 2050, we hope to see automatic voter registration, election day being a holiday, multi-lingual voting information and other structural changes that will lead to elections being accessible to everyone in the United States. And we hope to have contributed to 80% of eligible Latinos voting in every election as compared to only half of eligible Latinos who voted 2020.

The Latinx community is under-engaged by most of the pillars that make up our democracy. When our community is highlighted, it’s mainly in regards to being an immigration burden or to reinforce harmful stereotypes. A multicultural, multiethnic community that is 60 million strong and growing, needs to be treated with dignity. Systemic discrimination is the root of this problem that can be traced back to when the US border crossed Mexicans living on this land, the first “Latinos.”

Latinx voting and civic engagement rates reflect a lack of investment in organizing, civic education, and civic infrastructure building in my community. Only half of the estimated 32 million Latinos who were eligible to vote in 2020, participated. 

To close the gap in Latinx civic engagement, we must first shape the narratives that Latinx audiences hear about the key issues in their communities. Latinos are primarily concerned about the economy, health, education, history, culture and entertainment- and they're not getting that content.

Pulso is a digital media start-up working to fill this gap by “keeping the pulse on nuestra gente” withcontent that will uplift our community and remind them of the power we have to create conditions for our own success.

Pulso uses deep messaging on social media to build digital relationships with our audience to then lead them to political action including nonpartisan voter registration, get-out-the-vote, and issue advocacy. We're doing what in the voter outreach world is known as relational organizing.

We do this by engaging our users through stories that reflect our community’s various experiences and contributions with culturally relevant history, culture and news content for Latinos in the United States. Then we prompt our subscribers to share this content, as well as all of our voter outreach and advocacy actions, with their friends and family via personalized messages one on one via our chatbot that we've configured to do that. What's innovative and disruptive about our work is that we're using channels made to direct message, say, you're uncle Tim, to build a digital army of millions of politically active Latinos. 

Pulso can send one message to 1 million people, and each person will have received that message with their first name, as will everyone that person shares our content with. This model provides a unique opportunity to develop the elusive combination of deep relationship building, that can be scaled and has proven voter impact. 

In 2020, Pulso drove one of the largest digital friends & family get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaigns for Latinos in the United States. 

From November 1st-3rd, our GOTV program was powered by our more than 1.2 million subscribers sharing personalized voting messages with their friends and family.

Based on randomized controlled trials run by Facebook, Analyst Institute, and independent researchers, we can estimate that Pulso moved an estimated 57,000 Latino voters to turn out to vote who wouldn’t have otherwise. 

Aside from turning Latinos out to vote, our engagement efforts last year included:
More than 12,000 voter registrations
More than 4,500 vote-by-mail ballots requested
A Census push across Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Twitter. 

Latino voter registration and turnout rates are approximately 10 percent lower than those of Black voters and 18 percent lower than those of white voters. Pulso is stepping into this gap by speaking to the multifaceted interests of Latinos, shaping Latinos' understanding of issues, and inspire civic action.

For Pulso, our constituency is our audience. Across our six channels (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, TikTok and YouTube) we have 1.5 million people we are directly serving through our work. In one year, we anticipate doubling the amount of people we serve to reach more than 4 million Latinos across the United States.

The Sustainable Development Goal that aligns with Pulso is number 10: reducing inequalities within the United States.

We are working to dramatically increase Latinx civic participation, a historically excluded community in the United States, in advocacy and voting. The Latinx community is 18% of the the population with 32 million being eligible to vote but less than half participating in the election last year. Expanding nonpartisan civic participation for our community is critical for spurring policy-makers to be more responsive to our needs. And in an off-election year like this one, advocacy on issues that will improve our community's healthcare, access to education and access to equal opportunities is priority.

This year Pulso will develop over 50 issue and policy education stories (out of 240 total stories) and 1 million actions to distribute to subscribers. We aim for 500K of these actions to be advocacy actions (signing a petition, sharing advocacy actions/stories with friends & family, making phone calls, attending an event, volunteering, or donating) and the number of people who engage in these is how we will measure progress.

Of the overall 1 million actions goal, Pulso aims for over 100,000 shares of policy/issue/advocacy actions by subscribers/followers. 

Latinx audiences have more diverse media consumption habits and have a wide range of identities. Developing content and actions that speak to diverse Latinx audiences at scale while also communicating a coherent Pulso voice and political identity is a significant challenge. Developing deep subscriber relationships takes time and extensive content.

Pulso also faces the risks of operating on social platforms (Facebook, Messenger and Instagram, TikTok, YouTube) where changes to these platforms can significantly impact our ability to engage subscribers. 

To mitigate the first challenge, Pulso will continue to grow our content team. We plan to partner with Latinx influencers and highly skilled and culturally competent content creators as well as digital organizers who can speak to our audience directly about the issues and actions we plan to expand on this year.

To mitigate challenge number two, we are diversifying our channels to not rely on social platforms like Facebook and YouTube to reach our audience. We are including audio and podcast production to our testing, email newsletters and text messaging programs. To do this well, we plan to hire staff versed in growing communities via text and email. 

You wouldn't know about the outsized impact Pulso had in the 2020 elections from asking around about what we do or who we are. We are not well known. As a lean start-up, our energy and resources have been focused on doing the work. But now, after three years of doing that work well, we are trying to scale. To help us scale it's imperative for our work to be known so that we can leverage broader name recognition to grow our audience, build meaningful partnerships, and have even more impact in the years to come. 

With a larger platform, audience and recognition we would run an outsized get out the vote campaign for Latinos in 2022, an election year that yields low numbers since it's the midterms and not a presidential election. 

As a non-profit start up, we are also in the midst of testing how to grow our revenue streams to reach financial sustainability. With a broader platform, we would increase our revenue generation options through corporate sponsorship, live events and merchandise. Our goal: for Pulso's platforms covering over 40% of costs within two years of launching revenue generation on that platform (and 75%-100% sustainability within four years). 

First, Pulso is committed to being an anti-racist organization. We have commissioned the Maven Leadership Collective to train our team in equity, diversity and inclusion. Beyond this training, we have an ongoing anti-racism curriculum that includes small group step-backs to interrogate our team culture, self assessments, a mandatory anti-racism syllabus for the team to follow and additional training as needed as we find blind spots within our team.

Second, 100% of our 11 person staff identifies as people of color. This makes our entire team aware of the diverse identities within the Latinx community. 

Third, half of our team is part of the LGBTQIA+ community which ensures that the experiences of that community are centered at Pulso.

Beyond our internal culture, Pulso takes very seriously the need to combat racism and colorism within the Latinx community. Our content and editorial guidelines are built on intersectionality across identities, centering Latinos as agents of change, and combating the erasure of our Indigenous and Black roots. We ensure we're highlighting Latinos with Indigenous or Black backgrounds and we challenge internalized white supremacy with the content we share with our audiences.

One of Pulso's mottos is that we create content by Latinos, for Latinos. 95% of Pulso's team is Latinx. Further, as a small start-up that is fully remote, our team, with backgrounds in journalism, consulting, and tech, is autonomous and horizontal. Together we set Pulso's direction based on the insights from our audience, our advocacy priorities and platforms we engage.

My personal experiences also uniquely position me to do this work. 

1. I am a Venezuelan American from South Florida. I saw the left demonize my community’s plight for elections in Venezuela as a US ploy. I saw the right use my community’s pain to sow fear of “socialism” in the US. I want to do my part to bring Venezuelans, a new immigrant community, to better understand the American political system.

2. I am a college educated Latina raised by a single mother who passed away 8 years ago. At 24, I was left to figure out 401-K, student loans, healthcare, housing, and other “bread and butter” decisions that power our democracy, alone. I feel a responsibility to help the Latinx community better understand how our systems work so we vote for our interests and hold our leaders and institutions accountable.

The primary channel we used to do our voter engagement work in 2020 was Facebook Messenger. As part of Facebook's crackdown on bad actors last year, an unintended consequence was that outlets like Pulso were banned from sending messages to our audiences a month before the election. We didn't know what specifically had caused us to be confused with outlets peddling dis and misinformation. 

I took it upon myself to try to solve for this during the most tense time in the year and in the election cycle. After digging, I found out I was to blame because I was still an administrator of a politically partisan page on Facebook from before founding Pulso. I was mortified that it could be my fault that we would not be able to carryout our get out the vote efforts during this crucial election. 

I immediately removed myself from the page and gathered all the evidence I could to prove to Facebook that I had no current affiliation with that old page I administered. After many emails, tickets with their "claims" page, apologies to my team and many tears, I was able to get our Messenger capabilities reinstated in time for the elections. 

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This funding will be crucial to helping us scale. If selected as an Elevate Prize winner we will use the funds to help us grow our staff to be able to expand our audience of Latinx subcribers to new platforms (SMS, email, audio, etc.) and grow it to 4.4 million by the 2022 midterm elections.

Pulso has a particular focus on subscriber growth in AL, AZ, CO, FL, GA, IA, KS, MI, MN, NE, NM, NC, NV, PA, OH, VA, TX, and WI, states in the US with a large or growing Latinx community.

To do this we need to hire digital organizers, growth hackers, and content creators who are part of our community and can speak authentically to our subscribers. We also would invest in expanding our partnerships and collaborations in order to build brand and name recognition which we currently lack. 

This funding would allow us to continue researching and experimenting with strategies for scaling digital relationships and driving advocacy and education impacts with key Latinx constituencies. Our work to date to develop high impact digital voter engagement tactics positions Pulso to be able to leverage this prize to the fullest to scale our impact. 

We currently partner with non-profit media startups who are part of the Accelerate Change network including Noticias Para Inmigrantes, ParentsTogether, PushBlack and ProgressPop. What all of these media ventures share in common with us is that we are creating digital properties for historically excluded communities from the mainstream media in the United States. This includes the Black community, parents, Spanish dominant US citizens and English dominant Latinos. 

Together we share the purpose of creating deep digital relationships that scale and leveraging those relationships for non partisan civic participation that will help our communities hold politicians accountable for fulfilling their promises of making government work for all of us. 

We share strategies, insights, experiment ideas and resources with each other on a regular basis as well as tactics for voter engagement and outreach during election cycles.