Fact or Fiction Trivia

With the internet and the fracturing of traditional news media, the rise of misinformation has greatly damaged the health of democracies around the world that rely on informed citizenries. Here in the US, where civic education has long been backsliding in quality, nearly two thirds of adults are unable to name all three branches of the federal government and an equal percentage believe that "fake news" has sowed confusion about current events. With the majority of adults around the world now relying on social media as their news source, the risk of encountering misinformation is more common than ever before. According to a 2019 study of over 25,000 participants from democracies worldwide, 86% believe they've been exposed to "fake news" that they at one point believed to be true, and 83% also believe this has negatively impacted political discourse and trust of government. The same study found that most people blamed the US for the rise in misinformation, and 87% of respondents support better education for identifying false statements online. 

The rise of misinformation online is a problem not only because it can lead to people making political decisions that negatively impact their health (such as refusing vaccinations), but also because it leads to rising political apathy. This is unsustainable in a healthy democracy, which depends on active participation. Here in the US, young voters are consistently among the least active with less than 50% of citizens aged 18-29 regularly turning out to vote. Without more active participation among those who are most affected by some of the biggest challenges we face (climate change, income inequality, etc.), it will be impossible to garner sufficient support for policies that actually benefit the many over the rich and powerful few. Misinformation is also weaponized by authoritarian governments worldwide, which increasingly threaten the stability of struggling democracies. Therefore it is more important than ever to combat the spread of "fake news" and political apathy, which only fuels divisions and serves to benefit those already in power. 

Fact Or Fiction Trivia (factorfictiontrivia.com), is a cross platform trivia competition that aims to strengthen democracy by demystifying government, breaking down echo chambers, and connecting voting to the issues affecting peoples’ lives. Our trivia competition provides users with a wide variety of questions focused on national politics and sociopolitical issues. Users who build the highest scores by answering the most questions correctly, contesting questions they consider inaccurate, and/or submitting their own questions for approval, are regularly awarded small amounts of money. Users with the highest scores at the end of the month are eligible to compete in a Jeopardy-style game show hosted via webcam for a larger sum of money. The goal is to reduce polarization and improve news literacy at a time when the spread of misinformation is fueling higher distrust of political opponents and our neighbors. 

I have long admired the value of sports for bringing people of all backgrounds together where everyone's attention is focused on the same reality with a single outcome determined by a shared set of rules. I believe that trivia has the same potential, and judging by the incredible popularity of long-running game shows like Jeopardy, I think there is already a strong appetite for such a competition. Most voters I have spoken with in my market research agree that there is far more that brings us together than what separates us. However, without a platform or a reason to bring folks of opposing views together to interact in a friendly manner and build consensus, we will only further continue to drift apart on social media and in real life. This is dangerous, especially as political parties at home and abroad have used increasingly extreme and hyperbolic messaging to fundraise and mobilize voters.

The target audience for Fact or Fiction is wide ranging, from political junkies who want to prove their political knowledge, to individuals who don’t have time to follow politics regularly but want to stay informed, and anyone in between who wants to learn more about politics in a fun and concise way. Although we try to attract users who consider themselves more politically agnostic and need convincing to participate in the political process, most regular users are those who often pay attention to the news out of Washington and wish to supplement their understanding of politics with a fun game. 

We also hope to target younger voters where they are most active online: social media. By applying the lessons learned from the overnight success of Wordle, we hope to target Millennials and Gen-Z’ers by using a simple graphic (our owl logo with the user’s streak score pasted over it) to spark curiosity and drive traffic organically. The additional relational messaging tactics built into the site and the game itself attracts users by building community through competition and appealing to people’s innate desire for reward and affirmation.

I hope to prove that nonpartisan trivia games, like my site, have the potential to reduce partisan animosity by reaching, informing, and engaging voters of all backgrounds in a way that builds lasting empathy. At a time when voters are becoming harder to contact and persuade, my news entertainment platform could help draw in voters on the left and right without being dismissed as part of the hyper-partisan news landscape. I hope that by re-engaging individuals in civic education and forcing voters of opposing views to interact both collaboratively and competitively with each other, we will be able to strengthen trust in each other and our overall democracy.

Prior to launching the first iteration of Fact or Fiction in 2019, I worked for three years as Operations Director at Progressive Turnout Project, which launches voter turnout campaigns targeting inconsistent Democratic voters. During my time there, I learned not only how misinformed the average voter is, but also how effective simple trivia could be in fundraising. I gained this knowledge first-hand traveling the country and talking to voters. When I have hosted trivia game shows pitting complete strangers of opposing political ideologies against each other, I interviewed them afterwards to gauge their opinion of their opponents. Overwhelmingly, even though these people were competing against each other, everyone came away with a better impression of their opponent and their political party than they had going into the game. I gained similar feedback while traveling to political events like Iowa Caucuses to promote the site and hearing from individuals who wanted a platform that could reduce partisan animosity and prioritize building understanding.

Hannah Werman is my CTO and chief developer of the site. I have worked with her for the past four years, during which she has also worked full-time developing engaging voter-facing products for various progressive campaigns and organizations. She was the lead developer behind Edge, the Pete Buttigieg campaign’s relational organizing app, and has worked on numerous voter education and mobilization tools at BallotReady and Mobilize.

My advisor, Eric LaVanchy, has nearly three decades of experience in the online gaming industry. Most notably, Eric launched MindSports Football, a game featuring football trivia and knowledge-based gaming, engaging more than 200,000 football fans weekly during the NFL season. He has also developed numerous movie trivia applications for National CineMedia's theater pre-show entertainment.

I have already developed a website that is active and used by many users. My current reach on social media, where I regularly post trivia questions from the site, is about 800 followers and thousands of impressions. The site attracts about 20 unique visits each day and has approximately 600 registered users.

I am applying because I hope to find partners who are interested in collaborating with me and bringing their own ideas and expertise for how to effectively scale. I have numerous different ideas of how to grow the game, but I lack the research, technical and marketing experience necessary to make these changes on my own. 

Fact or Fiction Trivia has numerous characteristics that provides a unique advantage when compared to the other existing competitors in the trivia landscape. For starters, FoF is non-partisan, entirely political in focus, and it encourages skepticism. The number one complaint about members of the opposing political party is that they are misinformed, which is simply the result of ever narrowing echo chambers of information. That is why my site is unique in that it is the only existing platform that appeals to users on both sides of the aisle who wish to prove their knowledge. Secondly, the game show component appeals to both passive viewers and engaged users of the web app, which allows for building a larger audience. Unlike existing trivia apps, our site allows users to play on their own time and win cash prizes that are not divided between many different users. Lastly, FoF trivia is simple in design and very desktop friendly, meaning users of all ages are easily able to engage. 

Our platform is unique in that there does not exist a means to learn about politics, engage with strangers, and be encouraged to become civically active. There is significant research that shows people who are more informed about politics are more civically engaged and likely to vote, but without incentives in place, few people who are detached from politics will actually seek to learn more. Research also suggests that introducing gamification into informative political content will be a powerful tool to boost user engagement and knowledge retention. This is in part what led comedian Samantha Bee to launch a mobile app ahead of the 2018 midterm elections called ‘This is Not a Game,’ which was a 10 question live game, offered once a day offering a cash prize for top users. While short-lived, her app helped over 117,000 people register to vote and sign up for voting reminders. I want to build on this success but market it to users across the political spectrum.

Over the next year we hope to expand our reach both on the ground and online with increased investments in digital outreach and in-person marketing. This includes hiring more field staffers to promote the site at live political events and running targeted digital ads on the platforms where young Americans are most active (Instagram, and TikTok). We ideally will channel our efforts in important swing states so that one year from now we will have a robust presence in locations where presidential campaigns will be most focused. In addition to expanding our user base, we hope to grow the audience of our regular game shows by inviting influencers, comedians, and rising politicians to host the monthly competitions. If our hypothesis is correct, fun trivia competitions like ours could then be used by progressive campaigns, candidates, and/or organizations as a trojan horse to convey their message to voters who are missed by traditional outreach efforts. 

Over the next 5 years we hope to create a custom mobile app that will allow for a more robust gameplay, which includes enabling users to create their own leaderboard unique to their own friend group. We also hope to improve the reach and frequency of the game shows in order to appeal to a wider audience. Ideally we hope that politicians and celebrities would be willing to serve as hosts in order to promote themselves and engage directly with their fans. Lastly we hope to expand the backend analytics of the website so that we can provide interested partners with specific data about our users and what questions they struggle with and why. This data could be harnessed by a variety of organizations interested in learning more about their customers. 

Ultimately our goal is to make civic engagement cool by making it entertaining and enjoyable. This would have profound impacts on our democracy and help heal the growing divide we see here in the US and in democracies around the world. 

New users on our site will be given the option to complete a brief survey, which asks them to rank their level of partisanship and likelihood to vote in future elections. Users who complete the survey and register a free profile will be entered into a lottery pool that rewards a single individual with a large cash prize after the upcoming election (research shows this is a more effective means of increasing engagement than equally costly conventional promotions). Users will have to complete the survey a minimum of two times - once when they sign up, and again after 100 trivia questions answered, to provide insight into any shift in partisanship through increased engagement. Prior to awarding the final sweepstakes jackpot, eligible users will be surveyed once more, confirming whether or not they voted in the election, after which we will be able to analyze their change in likelihood of voting over time. If this method of indirect voter engagement proves successful, trivia competitions like ours could be used to boost engagement and turnout year-round, leading to returns in off-year elections, 2024, and beyond. 

A healthy democracy relies on a citizenry that is both informed and willing to engage with people of opposing beliefs. However, the rise of political misinformation and news silos has eroded understanding of politics and trust in each other, resulting in rising partisan animosity. This is unsustainable, as people find it increasingly difficult to respect someone from the opposing party simply based on their own partisanship, which limits their ability to cooperate or engage in a meaningful conversation about issues that matter to them. As a result, Americans grow up without a proper education on the way the US government operates, and by the time they reach voting age they lack the ability to objectively assess other people’s beliefs while also analyzing their own. That is why creatively improving civic education is necessary to building cooperation across the aisle and thus healing our ailing democracy.

Voter outreach campaigns are often unable to educate key demographics of voters using traditional methods despite large investments of time, money, and energy. Canvassing is effective, but requires building, training and sustaining a large team of volunteers that is limited in geographic scope and skilled in messaging. Mail programs are somewhat effective but costly, and they do not adequately target younger voters. Phone banking is somewhat effective, but is time wasting as answer rates continually decrease. TV/digital ads are expensive, not targeted, and largely ineffective. What DOES work is relational messaging, but current tools are based around a specific campaign/candidate, and they are not able to reach same key demographics that other methods are also unable to target. These tools also have relatively low adoption outside of organizers because people do not organically want to use these tools to talk to the people in their networks, or give campaigns their friends’ contact information. 

Therefore, at a time when voters are becoming harder to contact and persuade, our news entertainment platform will help draw in and inform infrequent voters without being dismissed as part of the hyperpartisan news landscape. There is ample evidence that adults are shifting away from traditional news media and are more likely to be reached online. About half of Americans say they get their news primarily from social media, with about 1⁄3 of Americans regularly relying on Facebook for their news. That is why our game attracts users by providing a mix of cash incentives and social pressure tactics to give users a chance to prove that their party is the most informed. This will help drive engagement and build community through competition. It is also positioned to survey users' change in partisanship and likelihood to vote over time, which we will analyze to determine if gamifying political education through trivia is a cheap and effective method for boosting civic engagement.

Our technology is a simple web app that functions like a mobile app if downloaded to a smartphone. To grow the audience, we will rely on relational messaging and social media pressure tactics that many political organizations already use. We believe that using trivia to gamify politics will be effective at bringing people together and building a consensus of facts because simply put, trivia is extremely popular. HQ trivia, a popular Trivia app, had 5.9 million users in its 1st quarter after launching (300k users/ night). Jeopardy! regularly has more weekly viewers than Game of Thrones at its height. Trivia also appeals to people's' shorter attention spans (the average visit to top 50 newspaper sites in 2018 was under 3 minutes).

When hiring for all positions, we focus our efforts on attracting a diverse set of applicants and providing a straightforward roadmap for collaboration and advancement. Establishing diversity within our team will be essential to effectively connecting with a wide variety of participants, so it is of utmost importance to our success to hire workers who represent all political and social backgrounds. 

Fact or Fiction Trivia seeks to join the entertainment, gaming, and educational mobile app industry. The FoF YouTube channel competes with numerous educational channels related to current events (Vox, Mental Floss, Smarter Every Day, etc.), and it will supplement political news entertainment channels (late night shows, independent journalism, influencers, etc.).

PolitIQ Trivia currently only offers a single, free version of the web app that allows users to: create a profile and choose a political “team”; win points by answering, contesting, and submitting questions; view and comment on other users’ profiles. The cost for advertisers to sponsor a jackpot on the leaderboard page of the site, which will include a banner at the top with their desired information, will vary depending on the size of the active user base, but for now is the following:

-       Weekly jackpot sponsorship: $20 ($5 of which goes to the top user)

-       Monthly jackpot sponsorship: $100 ($50 of which goes to gameshow winner)

Please see the “Research and Development” section below for details on the second, paid version of the website that we hope to build out ASAP.

PolitIQ Trivia seeks to quantify one’s political knowledge and regularly engage users in fact-based political discussion through:

·       Daily quizzes posted to politIQtrivia.com

o   Includes detailed explanation of answer to provide additional context

·       Videos uploaded to PolitIQ YouTube channel

o   Monthly gameshows, field segments, and interviews recorded at political events

·       Abbreviated content posted to social media

o   Post one question from daily quiz to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter

Roughly half of eligible voters cast a ballot in the 2018 election, which is still significantly more than the 37% of voters who participated in the elections four years earlier. Therefore, the goal of PolitIQ is to encourage those voters who do not typically participate to become more engaged in politics while also encouraging those who regularly participate to challenge their understanding of politics in a fun and informative manner. Nearly three quarters of Americans say they like to learn new things on a daily basis, which means there is certainly an appetite for folks across the political spectrum to challenge themselves and escape their echo chambers of information created by social media.

The target customer, who will eventually sponsor the weekly or monthly jackpots, is an individual or company that seeks to reach out to politically engaged individuals. There are a variety of organizations or people that fit this category, including: news publications or political newsletters that want to expand their audience; political action committees that want to attract new donors or volunteers; and small companies that want to market their products to individuals invested in politics. 

-Rent us their email list (unsub or subs)

-Buy ad spot on site

-Promote us on email/social (internal or external)

-Submit questions to site, branded quizzes, redirect to their site/material

-Use our questions in exchange for… $$,