playing games to make serious strategy
Since 2018, Democracy Works and partners have helped local leaders build serious strategy by turning it into a playful game. There is so much we can ALL learn from the success of "Votes and Ballots."
Dear Friends,
Going into the 2016 election, the partnerships team at 100% Democracy co-host Democracy Works faced a familiar challenge. They were making great civic technology for local partners but local partners needed more than just technology. Local partners needed support thinking through how to use that technology and many other tools as part of an authentic and effective campaign to move their community towards 100% voter participation.
The team at Democracy Works saw that many common formats for helping partners do this type of strategizing - webinars, powerpoint presentations at conferences, reports with recommendations about best practices - were far too passive. Passive learning is just not going to cut it when the mission is to help local partners figure out how to use all the tools at their disposal to spark a movement for 100% voter participation in their own communities!! To fulfill this mission the team at Democracy Works needed to create much more engaging and immersive learning experiences for local partners to create strategies together.
So they created “Votes and Ballots”, a joyful game of team wide strategizing that helps local partners and teams figure out how to use lots of different tools and diverse types of information to make an authentic and effective plan to move their community towards 100% voter participation. It’s immersive. It’s fun. And it’s seriously effective.
Since 2016 “Votes and Ballots” has evolved and grown in a variety of instructive ways. First, it quickly became apparent that many partners - not just Democracy Works - had an intense interest in creating immersive learning spaces for local partners to develop strong local 100% democracy strategies. So they partnered with the MICA Center for Social Design and Students Learn Students Vote Coalition to create new versions of the Votes and Ballots game that included resources from a variety of partners. The outcomes are the same again and again. When local partners have supportive spaces to strategize effectively, these partners end up using more resources from more sources more effectively. Votes and Ballots helps us all serve communities better.
Second, Democracy Works and their coalition partners have continued to create new editions of Votes and Ballots to support strategizing about different topics or in different contexts. There was a Votes and Ballots census edition that supported local partners strategizing about how ensure a complete count in their community. There is a Votes and Ballots curricular edition specifically geared to educators teaching students how to apply research findings to real world practice. When the pandemic hit, designers made a Votes and Ballots digital edition to allow for teams to do this kind of immersive strategizing and learning in digital spaces. A new Votes and Ballots “expansion pack” for advanced players helps local partners who already have robust 100% democracy plans think about how to take them to the next level. (You can order a download of all these editions here!).
There’s a certain irony to the way the joyful and playful immersion of Votes and Ballots creates serious results in improving local strategies. The lesson of Votes and Ballots is that in order to be serious about getting results, we need to make sure that we’re presenting our ideas in ways that are immersive and engaging and playful. Being all somber and serious about a conference presentation doesn’t usually translate into results. If the learning that occurs is too passive, if local partners aren’t supported with the environment they need to immerse themselves in applying their learning to their local context, then we’re not going to get great results!
Playful games are immersive and engaging for local partners. That immersion and engagement with the challenge of building a 100% democracy is what we need to build a movement that is serious about transformational change. Democracy Works and their partners have done an amazing job of working together for years to create the tools and coalition culture necessary to use playful games at scale to improve local strategies. I am so grateful to them for sharing this bold idea at the 100% Democracy Celebration. I can’t wait to see what’s next for Votes and Ballots. And I hope others in the 100% Democracy community will think about how they might use playful games in their work.
Have a great week!
Sam