New set of innovative resources will support campus efforts to achieve 100% student voter registration
WASHINGTON — Ask Every Student (“AES”), the national initiative that supports college and university efforts to ask every student to register to vote, released today its 2022 Toolkit, a groundbreaking set of nonpartisan strategies, tools, and tactics tailored to help institutions of all types and sizes achieve 100% voter registration rates.
The AES Toolkit was developed using a human-centered design process in collaboration with the Ask Every Student Codesigner Cohort, a diverse and deliberately selected group of leaders from 20 campuses throughout the US. This version is the second iteration of the resource to date following its initial release in 2020 and offers a more innovative, comprehensive, and campus-driven set of content. It also represents a significant leap forward for the Ask Every Student initiative and student voter registration and engagement efforts.
“This year’s AES Toolkit offers comprehensive and practical guidance for incorporating student voter registration processes into campus life in many new and impactful ways,” said Maddie Wolf, Resources and Campus Support Manager for the Students Learn Students Vote (SLSV) Coalition, an Ask Every Student Steering Committee member organization. “It can help campuses of all types and contexts implement the Ask Every Student framework more effectively and efficiently.”
The AES Toolkit features resources designed to support the implementation of four distinct nonpartisan voter engagement strategies:
- Academic Integration: Working with faculty to integrate civic engagement into the classroom, prepare students to participate in elections, and incorporate voter registration into the course registration process.
- Student Life Integration: Incorporating voter registration into processes like orientation, welcome week, bus/parking pass pick up, and other programming that touches students’ day-to-day lives.
- Student Leadership Opportunities: Recruiting and training students to be leaders and ambassadors of campus voting initiatives, including federal work study positions, fellowship programs, and incentivized volunteer ambassadorships.
- Institutional Partnerships: Developing strategic institutional partnerships with offices like the registrar, gaining commitment from senior leadership, and developing campus coalitions to advance equity.
The AES Toolkit also guides users through Human-Centered Design principles to identify the strategies and tactics that best meet the needs of their specific student and faculty populations, with the end goal of integrating meaningful, inclusive democratic engagement and voter registration processes into every aspect of campus culture.
“Having worked in the student voting space for over a decade, I’m floored by the practicality and ingenuity of the resources this toolkit provides for such a broad range of campus types and contexts,” said SLSV Coalition Co-founder and Executive Director Clarissa Unger. “We’re long past the days when setting up a table in the quad was considered the most effective way to register students to vote. The AES Toolkit reflects the present-day realities of campus professionals, local leaders, and students, and offers actionable solutions that can help any type of campus increase its students’ democratic participation.”
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Ask Every Student is a national joint initiative of the SLSV Coalition, the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, the Fair Elections Center’s Campus Vote Project, and NASPA – Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, that facilitates collaboration between campus leaders and nonprofit partners to help campuses ask every student to participate in the democratic process and achieve full student voter registration.
