Our Approach

Focus for Democracy Action researches programs and reviews evidence to identify where election-related donations can achieve the highest impact. The majority of our work is non-partisan and aims to increase voter participation and provide non-partisan voter education to the public, including to our growing network of over 20,000 donors.

With a given amount of money, we believe in helping donors focus on making significant contributions to a select number of organizations that have been thoroughly evaluated, rather than distributing smaller donations more broadly to a multitude of organizations that cannot be evaluated with the same rigor.

For the portion of our work that is partisan, we first identify key races that are critical to protecting our democracy. We then identify evidence-based programs with the potential to significantly impact those races. These programs either provide non-partisan information to voters or produce votes for the pro-democracy candidate, or both. Evidence-based programs track and measure their impact (i.e., net votes produced) by conducting randomized controlled trials or other verifiable methods.

Some widely-used election programs can cost more than several thousand dollars to gain one vote, while others may produce 15 votes for the same cost. The differences in impact can be huge. Our recommendations help donors maximize the number of votes they gain from their contributions.  

Our evaluators aim to ensure that every dollar spent on programs recommended by Focus for Democracy generates more votes in key competitive races than alternative investments.

Our Process for Recommending Programs

Our evaluation team spends hundreds of hours each year reviewing data to recommend the most cost-effective programs. See our Research on Election Programs for a full explanation. An overview of our process is below.

Identify Potential Programs
We actively seek out organizations that implement evidence-based election tactics at scale in key, targeted races. Interested organizations also approach us.

Evaluate Programs
We review program data to determine if they meet our criteria. Organizations must be open to our intensive investigation process (including discussions of their track record, progress, strengths, and weaknesses) and thorough vetting of the evidence they present regarding their impact.

We prioritize programs and tactics that are backed by evidence from randomized controlled trials. Whether the goal is to measure the impact of a new pharmaceutical drug or a persuasion tactic, randomized controlled trials are the gold standard for rigorous research evidence. Without randomized controlled trials, it is usually impossible to know how many votes might have been cast even without the program, and how many resulted from it.

We know that some critically important programs can’t be evaluated in this fashion. For those, we dig deeply into all the available data and examine other factors, including the organization’s reputation and track record.

Recommend Programs
Sound funding decisions involve both solid evidence and judgment calls. Once we’ve developed initial recommendations, we invite other donor advisors and evaluators to make assessments and provide feedback on our analysis.

We present our final recommendations at Focus for Democracy Zoom Events, meetings with foundations and donor advisors, and in reports to our network.

Track Results
We maintain close and ongoing communication with our top recommended organizations to gain insights into their activities and progress over time. We also encourage the organizations we recommend to incorporate randomized controlled experiments into the work we support, allowing them to continually refine their targeting and messaging, and enabling us to evaluate their results after the election.