WASHINGTON – The national abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America has spent the year intensively researching how it can close a so-called “virality gap” online with voters.
Its answer involves social media influencers, comedians, and the Joe Rogan podcast.
Convinced it is losing the online messaging battle with abortion rights opponents, NARAL is revamping its digital outreach to more aggressively court voters who are politically ambivalent about abortion but are resistant to government regulation of the procedure. That means communicating with men and women who aren’t part of the Democratic Party’s base, on online venues not usually the recipient of political messaging.
“As an organization that’s 50 years old, you’ve got to touch base and look at what you’re doing, and how you’re doing it, to make sure you’re meeting the moment,” said Kimberly Peeler-Allen, a NARAL board member.
The new effort is part of a larger restructuring as the organization seeks to nationalize its operations — including ending the autonomy of nearly a dozen state-based affiliates — ahead of what officials with the group universally expect to be a turbulent time for abortion rights supporters.
NARAL told its affiliates Friday that it was moving up its timeline for the transition period, fully nationalizing its efforts in the fall of this year instead of in 2023, when the changeover was initially supposed to occur.
The restructuring has received harsh criticism — including from some officials within the organization. Some of the heads of state-based NARAL affiliates, unsure of their own future with the group, argue that the digital strategy siphons resources away from local, in-person persuasion they consider more effective.
“A digital plan, it doesn’t say anything,” said Diana Philip, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Maryland. “It’s sharing information, but it doesn’t motivate people to act.”
Peeler-Allen and other national NARAL leaders dispute that expanding their digital footprint means they will pull back from on-the-ground organizing and broadly argue that the reorganization — part of a five-year strategic plan agreed to in June — is necessary to modernize the group’s operations.
“As we were going through the process, we said, ‘What is the world going to look like over the next five years?’” Peeler-Allen said. “And the reality is, unfortunately we need to prepare for the likelihood that Roe will fall. And what does that mean for the work, what does it mean for reproductive health care access, abortion access all across the state? And how can we best meet this moment?”
DIGITAL
Whether the U.S. Supreme Court, where conservatives now hold a 6-3 advantage, would strike down Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, is a matter of debate among legal experts. But NARAL officials say if legal protections are diminished or outright removed nationwide, it will heighten the need to win the public debate.
It’s why NARAL leaders say they are so worried about the digital gap and the effect it has on the electorate’s views. Adrienne Kimmell, NARAL’s acting president, grew alarmed last year when she conducted voter focus groups in Arizona and Michigan where the participants began discussing a New York law that expanded abortion rights.
The discussion, she said, tracked almost word-for-word with how abortion rights opponents discussed the measure, including assessments Kimmell deemed factually inaccurate.
“People don’t normally follow state legislative efforts in states where they don’t live,” Kimmell said. “And that, for me, was a really aha moment.”
Research conducted by NARAL, shared with McClatchy, suggests that online users are more likely to find more content supportive of abortion rights on Google. The dynamic flips, however, when users are on a social networking site like Facebook or watch videos on YouTube, in part because of the popularity of anti-abortion websites such as Lifesitenews.com.
“The discussion they’re accessing online becomes part of a conversation,” Kimmell said. “So it is a pervasive problem that we face. And the scale has grown exponentially over time as our digital world becomes larger and larger.”
NARAL began a multi-faceted research project into abortion information on the internet near the start of this year, first gauging what types of content people were likely to see online before identifying different groups of voters who could be influenced by NARAL-backed messages.
The research isn’t over yet. Group officials say they are still testing the exact content they will use when they start implementing their new strategy in the fall. It is expected to include short online ads and endorsements from social media influencers.
But Dina Montemarano, NARAL’s research director, said the findings have led the group to identify three key voter blocs, which officials labeled “For The Win,” “Kids First” and “No Special Treatment.” Rather than identifying each group purely by demographics, the political strategists organized them according to values.
Kids First, for instance, includes mostly parents and grandparents of different races keenly interested in their children, many of them religious. For The Win includes primarily entertainment-seeking younger adults who enjoy video game streams and stand-up comic videos. And the No Special Treatment community involves mostly middle-aged men who like to follow the rules.
These were the types of voters — many of them not consumed by politics day-to-day — NARAL was failing to engage with, Montemarano said. And it led to what she described as a “virality gap” between her side and abortion rights opponents, with the latter having more success promoting their viewpoint across the internet.
“To me, there was this big gap in the middle,” she said. “Where is everyone else? What information are they seeing? What are they believing? How can we reach the people beyond the activists? So that’s where the real idea for this project began.”
MESSAGE
Where to reach these men and women with conflicted views of abortion politics, and how best to shape their views of abortion politics was a separate challenge.
Members of the No Special Treatment group, for example, may watch online streams of the popular podcaster Joe Rogan. Kids First voters regularly spend time on TMZ.com. Members of the For the Win category, meanwhile, are likely to watch clips of the sketch comedy show “Key and Peele.”
Engaging in formats where they might not expect to encounter explicit political content requires the group to reframe the style of its messages, Montemarano said, shifting away from traditional political advertising to being more in sync with the media they are already consuming.
So if the group decides to run an ad during an online clip of Rogan’s show — a possibility, NARAL officials say — the content would not look anything like a traditional political ad. More likely, they say, the ad will be delivered in an off-beat style from a comedian.
Officials point to posts from social media influencers, like one done last year from Georgia-based lifestyle blogger Christina Rodriguez, as the type of content they’ll embrace even more going forward.
“There is tremendous untapped potential to continue to grow our base of support for reproductive freedom, including from some surprising places,” Montemarano said. “Many people have nuanced and complex views on abortion, among a whole host of other issues, but there is a strong consensus that politicians have no place in personal decisions about pregnancy and parenthood.”
Group leaders say that rather than emphasize health care or other issues connected to abortion, they plan to emphasize a message of freedom from political interference, emphasizing that conservatives who oppose abortion rights want to control people.
In focus groups, that was the unifying issue across all three groups, Montemarano said.
“It just came up again and again and again,” NARAL’s research director said. “It wasn’t me on a white board deciding freedom would be the call.”
CRITICISM
NARAL’s plans to nationalize its operations means the group could part ways with its 11 state-based affiliates.
The plan was unveiled in June, to the anger of many affiliates. And many of them say retooling the digital effort matches their broader concern about a group more focused on the national big picture than local issues that can often have the most impact on the public.
“The concern is focusing on a top-down, digitalized structure leaves out the voices of the impacted people on the ground and misses critical opportunities to engage and organize people at a grassroots level,” said Mallory Schwartz, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri.
Schwartz and Philip both said they aren’t yet sure what will become of their groups, although neither ruled out the possibility their state-based organizations would break away from NARAL entirely and become independent entities.
Both said they were fearful that the national structure would remove time spent on local access issues, like convincing corner pharmacies to carry certain medications.
“It feels like armchair quarterbacks in Washington, D.C., doing guesswork in states where they have no connections,” Philip said.
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