Digital engagement for civic participation

The Latino community in the United States is underrepresented and under-engaged by most of the pillars that make up our democracy. When our community IS highlighted, it’s more often than not in regards to being an immigration burden or to reinforce harmful stereotypes. It’s no wonder that, with that harmful view, millions of Latinos are not likely to believe that the government and our institutions can actually benefit them in their everyday lives and help them solve their problems. 

Less than half of the 32 million Latinos in the United States eligible to vote participate in elections. We’re nearly 20% of the population of the United States, yet neither political parties nor civic organizations are doing year-round voter education and relationship building to ensure a highly participatory Latino voting block.

Pulso is a digital media outlet working to solve this problem with content by and for Latinos highlighting the Latino history no one taught us and commentary from a Latino perspective you won't find anywhere else. We build deep digital relationships with more than 1 million Latinos across six different channels by developing culturally-resonant stories that attract and engage our Latino subscribers year round with content they want and need. We build trust and belonging: we build community with our audience and then leverage our relationship with them for civic action including running non-partisan voter registration drives, helping our audience make a plan to vote, request a vote by mail ballot,  take the Census, and take action on issues they care about. 

Where do we do this? On Facebook Messenger as you all can see more closely in my video submission.

We serve Latinos in the United States, specifically, voting age Latinos in the United States. That’s 34 million people and growing, since every year nearly a million Latinos turn 18 years old and become eligible voters. 

But, our community is starved of culturally resonant communication that speaks to them, that can engage them, that can help them learn how to participate in our elections, and make informed choices. 

First, the biggest misconception by those trying to reach Latinos: we speak ENGLISH! Yes, this deserves all caps because it’s a big frustration that still needs to be explained. There’s a misconception that we prefer Spanish.

Yes, many of us are fully bilingual, and we love conserving our traditions, but, according to a recent Pew Research Center study, U.S.-born Latinos overwhelmingly prefer to get their news in English. Just over half of U.S. Hispanic adults (54%) get their news mostly in English – far higher than the share who get their news mostly in Spanish (21%). 

Yet, there are very little media outlets delivering this for them. As I mentioned in one of the earlier questions, media, especially in English, often depicts Latinos in negative stereotypes: we're “dirty immigrants,” criminals, or sex symbols. That’s why Pulso exists, to create stories around Latino history, commentary on current events, sharing impact stories that will inform and elevate our community, in English, to speak to us directly and fill their information needs year round.

Our team: 100% of our staff are voting age Latinos living in the United States. We are who we’re serving. 

Design and implementation of solution:

1. Dialogue: We ask key questions and use surveys to get to know our subscribers and their interests when they begin engaging with us and on an ongoing basis. We also carefully track what types of content and issues that individuals in our communities respond to so we can deliver more of the content that resonates using segmentation. These approaches allow us to be in a consistent dialogue with community members through our digital media channels.

2. Feedback processes: One of the ways we ground ourselves in our community is by regularly conducting constituent discovery to hear from our community members first-hand. Feedback processes are particularly important for us when we frequently explore offering new digital products or seek to optimize our existing digital products to make them more impactful. For example, new products include new potential podcasts, shows, content series, campaigns, or channels. We often incorporate phone calls, in-person meetings, and live chat to ensure we are receiving nuanced feedback from our communities.

3. Interactive content development: We use lean startup methodology for experimentation with our content and with ways to structure our stories (builds). Whether we are testing new approaches or working to optimize our existing approaches, rigorous testing with subsets of our communities helps us validate or invalidate our hypotheses about our content. These experiments we run with our subscribers create a continuous feedback loop to constantly ensure that our subscribers inform the media content we offer and how we deliver that content to our communities.

Pulso has grown our base of Facebook Messenger subscribers from less than 200,000 in 2018 to over 2 million subscribers by 2020. In the last three years since our success on Messenger, we've launched Instagram, TikTok, a podcast channel and a newsletter to reach more Latino voters and have tens of thousands of subscribers on those new channels as well.

By the start of the new fiscal year, July 1st, 2024, Pulso will have exited our fiscal sponsorship with the incubator that helped us launch and we will be running as our own independent organization. This is, of course, exciting, and, will also mean that we’ll be learning as we go to ensure the foundational, operating structure of Pulso is sound. Everything from handling our own payroll to financial forecasting, having the best yet affordable healthcare offerings for our team, to ensuring we have proper legal counsel, are all responsibilities that we will now have to manage ourselves.

We’re up for the challenge and ready for it! And, if Pulso were to win this award and I were to become a Solver of behalf of the team, we would absolutely leverage the know-how of the network and of our other peers selected regarding best practices for how they run their organizations and implement what applies at Pulso. 

When you think of Facebook Messenger, the main place we run our digital organizing campaigns, you probably think of it as a place to touch base with a childhood friend. We saw an opportunity to use this one-on-one messaging platform to launch a chat bot content service that delivers Pulso content one-on-one at scale to hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Since launching in 2018 we’ve sent weekly Latino history stories, along with links for our subscribers to register to vote, make a plan to vote, and request a vote by mail ballot, all straight from their Messenger inbox. 

We hope that this use of this social network can inspire other organizations to leverage the power of scale and connection offered by social media platforms to scale their solutions.

Before the work that Pulso is doing, grassroots organizing has been very difficult to scale. That's why Pulso exists in the first place. To build digital relations that can result in massive civic action at scale. 

To validate that our efforts to move Latinos to be more participative in elections through our voter registration, vote by mail, request a vote by mail ballot and take action on other issues approach actually worked, we enlisted Facebook, the Analyst Institute, and independent researchers to run a randomized controlled trial of the efficacy of friends & family GOTV messages on Facebook Messenger.

From that study of our initiatives we can estimate the increase in turnout that Pulso’s campaign generated in 2020 and 2022: Pulso moved an estimated 80,000 Latino voters to turn out to vote who wouldn’t have otherwise were it not for our Facebook Messenger outreach.

This is an election year, so, our metrics for success will be how many people can we register to vote? How many can we help plan to vote? How many will request a vote by mail ballot? How many will share a voting message with their friends?

These are the actions we track every election cycle. After election day on November 5th, we'll be able to measure the success of our digital engagement for civic participation solution by looking at the data of the actions via Facebook Messenger and our other platforms and then matching that with the voter file (which is public information) enlisting our partners at the Analyst Institute again to help us run another randomized controlled trial to measure impact.

We use Meta's Facebook Messenger app to send content and engage our audience in action via a chatbot we built that does one-to-one messaging to thousands of people at a time. My team builds the bot we use using Chatfuel, a low cost, easy to configure, codeless software that allows us to create "builds" with our content and civic action prompts we ask our audience to take via Facebook Messenger.

12 full time staff
10 content contractors

I founded Pulso in 2018, so, we've been doing this work for six years.

Not only is our entire team Latino, but we hail from across South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. We have Afro-Latino and Indigenous and queer representation on our team. We have parents on our team, too. The identities within our Latino staff are also representative of the diversity within our community.

Pulso is also 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 and additional training as needed as we find blind spots within our team.

Our main product for our audience is our content. The feedback we get from our audience by and large is always the most rewarding way to measure the electoral impact we’re so proud of. We get hundreds of positive comments on our content and through our DMs in Facebook Messenger and Instagram who often share how happy they are to be learning about the contributions that Latinos make to this country that they hadn’t read or learned anywhere else.

I’ll share a response I received just yesterday from one of our subscribers. This was her response to my thank you email for her $20 donation to Pulso: “I just want you to know that as a Latina I appreciate what you do and I enjoy all the reading.” -Jaque Quintana

Right now, most of our content is free for our audience across our platforms. Based on surveys asking our audience what more they would want  from Pulso, we’re exploring offering in-person, paid experiences that build deeper community with our audience around our history content, the most popular content vertical we have.

Right now we bring in money to Pulso based on a combination of grants, sustained donations from our audience through our monthly membership model, and advertising revenue from businesses interested in reaching our Latino audience. The breakdown is 85% grants, 5% audience membership, 5% advertising. 

Some of our philanthropic partners to date who have funded us at the five and six figure levels have been NewMedia Ventures, Borealis Philanthropy, Park Foundation, and NEO Philanthropies.

In the long term, our plan is for our financial breakdown to be 50% grants, 30% advertising revenue and 20% audience memberships.