Winning Young Voters
The Millennial Generation is a crucial constituency to engage for 2008. But how? The Wining Young Voters panel brings together experts from the campaign and advocacy world to discuss how to use new media tactics to engage and mobilize young voters in 2008 and beyond.
Chair: Kat Barr - Deputy Political Director, Rock the Vote
Kat Barr is the Deputy Political
Director at Rock the Vote. In this role, Ms. Barr oversees Rock the
Vote’s political outreach program, working to ensure candidates, campaigns, and
other organizations recognize and harness the power of young voters. Within
this, Ms. Barr also coordinates Rock the Vote’s research, which is focused on
testing the best practices for registering, educating and mobilizing young
voters, and better understanding the youth cohort through opinion research. Ms.
Barr is one of the country’s foremost experts on young voters and appears
frequently in the press.
Ms. Barr comes to RTV from Young Voter Strategies (YVS), a clearinghouse of
young voter research which integrated its programs with those of RTV in August
2007. Prior to becoming YVS’s Research Director, Ms. Barr coordinated
media outreach for YVS's 15-organization project that registered 500,000 18-30
year olds to vote during the 2006 election cycle. The 2006 project
generated more than 750 news stories on young voters in outlets including The
Washington Post, The Associated Press, USA Today, The New York Times, The Los
Angeles Times, and on PBS, CBS, ABC, and CNN.
Ms. Barr has a wide variety of experience in politics and advocacy. Prior to
YVS, Ms. Barr founded and ran the Advocacy Project of the National Student
Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness. At NSCAHH, Ms. Barr helped build
support on Capitol Hill for affordable housing and food assistance legislation,
organized letter-writing and call-in campaigns with students, and authored two
studies, Communities in Crisis and A 50-State Analysis of Proposed Food Stamp
Cuts. In 2005, Ms. Barr and NSCAHH student advocates were featured in more
than 150 news stories, including in The Washington Post and on Fox News
Channel.
Ms. Barr is a long-time actor in the youth vote community, having served on the
Executive Committee of the Youth Vote Coalition's Board of Directors from 2002
to 2004. She is originally from Santa Rosa, California, and graduated from
Cornell University in 2000 with a degree in psychology.
Adam Klaus, Credo Mobile
If a fourth-grade campaign to stop his school's use of Styrofoam lunch trays is any clue, Adam Klaus has always had a hunger for improving the world around him. He has been working professionally in community, national, and electoral groups for close to eight years. As a member of the Politics Team at CREDO Mobile (formerly Working Assets), a San Francisco based wireless phone company and social change organization, he manages key civic engagement projects, including an online voter registration Widget and API that is powering Rock the Vote's unprecedented drive to register young voters leading up to the 2008 election. Adam has also served as Wisconsin State Director of the Young Voter Alliance (2004), headed the training department of the U.S. Student Association from 2001 to 2003, and was a staffer on Tammy Baldwin's (WI) successful congressional campaign (2000).
Ben Rigby - Founder, Mobile Voter
Ben Rigby has spent the last twelve years developing youth-focused Web and mobile phone strategies for nonprofit organizations and some of the world’s top businesses.
Rigby began his career in high tech in 1995 as webmaster for a startup named the Main Quad, which launched one of the first online communities for college students. At Main Quad, Rigby invented an application that allowed students to publish personal profiles online and he innovated what may have been the first-ever Internet greeting card system. The Main Quad was acquired by Student Advantage in 1997.
Next, Rigby cofounded and became CEO of a Web development firm called Akimbo Design. Here Rigby explored the convergence of design and Internet technology, creating high-end Web sites for top-tier brands. Akimbo achieved international renown and a world-class client list that included such companies as The North Face, Beringer Vineyards, California Pizza Kitchen, Nokia, Sony Pictures, MGM, and Macromedia. His work won dozens of awards and has been featured in many publications, such as Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today.
While at Akimbo, Rigby developed an affinity for a client doing innovative work with young people and digital filmmaking. Rigby joined DFILM.com as CTO and guided the development of the DFILM MovieMaker—a Web application that allowed people to create and share online films. It was an instant hit, attracting millions of young filmmakers in its first two months and subsequently licensed by Yahoo!, Sam Adams, Hyundai, IBM, the Sierra Club, and Old Navy. It was at DFILM where Rigby began to explore mobile phone technology. He developed one of the first-ever text-messaging games for Calvin Klein in 2000 and a platform for cartoon-based mobile messaging—which launched on KPN’s iMode network in the Netherlands.
Rigby then became president of 415 Inc, a Web development firm with a nonprofit focus, based in San Francisco. 415 developed Web sites and software for such clients as the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Women’s Funding Network, Bay Area Rapid Transit, KQED, the Library of Congress, McGraw-Hill, Peninsula Open Space Trust, San Francisco Ballet, and the San Francisco Symphony. In this role, Rigby worked closely with organizations to develop strategies to further stretch, chronically stretched nonprofit budgets.
In 2004, Rigby founded Mobile Voter, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization dedicated to using Internet technology to empower young people’s participation in civic life and politics. Mobile Voter conducted innovative voter registration drives from 2004 to 2006 using mobile phones and text messaging. The organization’s mobile software has been used by over two hundred nonprofits in the United States. In 2005, the organization won the Wireless Innovation Award at CTIA (the premier wireless conference). Rigby is a frequent speaker on the conference circuit and is an active participant in the community of organizations using new media for social change.
Rigby earned his BA in Anthropology from Stanford University in addition to Honors with Distinction in Science, Technology, and Society. He was also elected to Stanford’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Rigby currently resides in San Francisco, where he enjoys frequent trips to the area’s many taquerias.
Adam Conner - Washington, D.C. Associate for Privacy and Global Public Policy Division, Facebook
Adam
Conner is the Washington DC Associate for Privacy and Global Public Policy at
Facebook, where he focuses on privacy and regulatory issues, political outreach
and partnerships.
Prior
to Facebook, Adam was the Director of Online Communications for Congresswoman
Louise Slaughter, Chairwoman of the Rules Committee in the U.S. House of
Representatives. He previously served as the Deputy Director of Online
Communications for Forward Together, the presidential exploratory committee for
former Virginia Governor Mark Warner.
Adam
holds a bachelor’s degree in political communication from the George
Washington University.
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