The midterm elections are less than a week away and theSkimm team may be campaigning just as hard as the candidates. The team launched their second nonpartisan “No Excuses” campaign in September to get at least 100,000 people to vote this November.
Shortly after the start of the 2012 presidential election, Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin, the cofounders and co-CEOs of theSkimm, quit their jobs at NBC and started their email newsletter the Daily Skimm from their couch because they wanted to help millennial women like themselves get informed about the news. Now theSkimm has approximately 7 million Daily Skimm subscribers, about half of whom are female millennials, according to the team.
“No Excuses was launched around a genuine belief that there’s no excuse not to be an engaged citizen. We want to eliminate all of the excuses that our generation uses to not vote by providing them the information and resources to get informed and go to the polls on Election Day,” Weisberg and Zakin said of their grassroots campaign.
More than 40,000 people joined “theSkimm squad” by pledging to vote and spreading the word. The team chose “Skimm’bassadors” across both sides of the aisle to be “Vote Captains” in charge of activating their communities throughout the year through events, meetups, calls and canvassing. In the summer, theSkimm brought 30 “Vote Captains” to their headquarters in New York City for a two-day conference to teach captains how to encourage their community to register, get politically informed, talk about the issues and show up to the polls.
“Being a No Excuses Captain has been an unbelievably rewarding experience. I’ve been given resources, inspiration and a national brand behind me to support my endeavors to register and mobilize my own network to the polls. Additionally, I have met the most talented, intelligent and inspirational women, my co-captains, from across the country who share the same passion I do about our number one goal—inspiring others to make their voice heard at the polls,” said Chelsea Stallings of Texas who ran multiple voter registration drives and social events in Dallas. “When others see your passion about why it’s important to vote, they too will feel their own passion and find their own why,” she said.
“It has always been important that we listen to our audience and one of the most common things we heard from our Skimm’bassadors was that they were eager to engage with their communities but lacked the tools and resources to do so. Additionally, we’ve known since the beginning that building a grassroots movement was vital to the success of this campaign,” said Weisberg and Zakin.
Bringing the captains in helped them do both and became critical to the campaign. “But it was listening to the captains’—who came from across the country and different political affiliations—personal stories of why voting is important to them that [was] the most inspiring and really became the heart of this campaign,” they said. On National Voter Registration Day, theSkimm team and their Skimm’bassadors held more than 50 events to help people register.
To reach more new voters, theSkimm team published a full-page ad in the New York Times with the names of the first 3,000 people to commit to voting (and a note that they registered approximately 90,000 additional people) and designed and placed billboards in highly-trafficked areas across the country with competitive midterm races and created city-specific projections in Chicago and New York. The team also launched a comprehensive microsite with guides to key issues, races and candidates and other resources including a Text theSkimm initiative that let people text theSkimm team for voter registration deadlines and information, down-ballot positions, absentee ballots and explanations of state issues.
As theSkimm has skyrocketed, the cofounders have remained dedicated to the goal they had when they sat on their couch during the 2012 election and hit “send.” But they aren’t bootstrapping their business anymore and their 75-person team has outgrown their couch. theSkimm has raised nearly $30 million and recently closed a $12 million Series C funding round led by GV along with a group of mostly female investors including Shonda Rhimes, Tyra Banks, Willow Bay, Jesse Draper, Linnea Roberts, Hope Taitz and Spanx founder Sara Blakely, according to the team.
But even as their influence has increased they’ve made it clear that they don’t want to tell people how to vote. “We feel that the role of our company is to provide our audience with the resources they need to make an informed decision. We don’t believe it’s our place to tell them what decision to make. There are already so many places for political opinions yet there are very few that put the onus on getting out there and casting your vote,” said Weisberg and Zakin. In 2016, the “No Excuses” campaign led more than 110,000 people to register to vote, according to the team, and this year they want to go one step further by getting people to show up to vote.
