Young people do all kinds of cool things in the latest video by the Vlipy Za Sebe media initiative: dance and make art, ride cars and skateboards and pose as fashion models. But at the end, they all do one thing that is just as cool – they vote.
“It makes no difference who you are. But if you’re not indifferent, come to the local elections on Oct. 25 and vote,” a caption to the video says in Ukrainian.
With such videos and social media posts, Vlipy Za Sebe promotes voting among young Ukrainians with the images and language they use. The name can roughly be translated as “Slap On for Yourself,” but there is another phrase the initiative uses in English – “Rave the Vote.”
“We try to appeal to youth through their interests. Through street culture, for example, when young people skateboard. We address them in their own visual language,” project coordinator Svitlana Kolodii told the Kyiv Post.
Only 27% of young people voted in the last parliamentary elections, according to the national exit poll by the Razumkov Center. For the Oct. 25 local elections, Vlipy Za Sebe wants to increase that turnout by encouraging youth to be more active and conscious in choosing their future.
Negative trends
Young Ukrainians have been losing interest in politics for several years now. Kolodii and her colleagues at the Global Office non-governmental organization started noticing that from talking to schoolchildren and students within their GoGlobal and GoEast language and cultural exchange camps.
“The word ‘politics’ and participation in politics or elections is something very foreign to them,” Kolodii says.
But Kolodii was still shocked by the results of a national youth poll in 2017. The “Youth of Ukraine 2017” poll by GfK Ukraine found that only 10% of young people aged 14 to 29 were interested in politics. Only one in five young Ukrainians thought that being politically active is important, and over 70% did not trust political institutions.
Decreasing interest in politics is also reflected in the election turnout. 46% of voters aged 18 to 29 came to their polling stations in the 2014 presidential election, according to the national exit poll by the Razumkov Center. The turnout decreased in the 2019 presidential elections, when 40% of young Ukrainians voted in the first round and 43% in the second one.
The theory that more young people would come out to support popular comedic actor Volodymyr Zelensky, who would later become the youngest president in Ukrainian history, did not hold.
First steps
After carrying the idea for a few years, Global Office finally started working on the Vlipy Za Sebe campaign on May 17, 2019 by signing a partnership with the ENGAGE program financed by the United States Agency for International Development. They hoped to increase the young voter turnout to 45% in the parliamentary elections that were scheduled for October 2019.
But three days later, Zelensky was inaugurated as president and announced that he was dissolving the parliament. The election would take place in July 2019.
So Vlipy Za Sebe had only two months, which was not nearly enough. In a rush, they developed the branding of the campaign with the Angry creative agency. They published their first video just a week before the vote.
The July 2019 parliamentary elections set a record low of 27% turnout by young voters. That’s when Vlipy Za Sebe realized that it had a long way to go.
Bold and relatable
“The medium is the message,” a phrase coined by the Canadian communications philosopher Marshall McLuhan, is especially relevant when trying to engage youth in politics. The message should be clear and engaging and shared through the same channels they use.
Vlipy Za Sebe talks to young Ukrainians through their social media – Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. The images should be eye-catching and the text should be easily understood. The snappy name and logo of the initiative encapsulate both features.
“With the name, we wanted to be bold somehow,” Kolodii says. “It’s a phrase that some person could actually say: ‘I will take my vote and slap it on the ballot so that nobody does it for me.'”
The target audience of Vlipy Za Sebe is the same group of 18- to 29-year-old Ukrainians, but not those already engaged in politics, Kolodii says. To reach the majority who don’t vote, the initiative has to compete for their attention with lots of things: games, music, viral videos, new iPhones, etc.
They have gone all-out to do that. Vlipy Za Sebe made videos where skaters and freestyle cyclists tick a ballot box while performing tricks. They created an Instagram game called “Don’t Be Afraid to Open Your Mouth,” where users shoot plasma at the city’s infrastructure issues by opening their mouths, literally. In the physical world, the initiative put up posters with monsters representing Ukraine’s political problems in some of the largest cities – Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Dnipro and Lviv.
Vlipy Za Sebe also initially planned to emulate the U.S. “Don’t Vote” campaign, where celebrities and the elderly told young people not to vote only to provoke the opposite reaction. But, instead, they used someone more relatable – ordinary young Ukrainians or trendsetters in their cities, like designers, musicians, advertisers, IT developers and baristas.
“Some dream to work in Europe, and some to develop their country. I want to develop my own. That’s why I go to the polls,” advertising student Diana Ocheretna says in one of the posts by Vlipy Za Sebe.
At one point, Vlipy Za Sebe also started educating young Ukrainians about politics and Ukraine’s political institutions through posts and video explainers. Based on these, they developed lessons for children in schools, who will only be eligible to vote in the future.
Through projects like that, Vlipy Za Sebe might make long-term changes to Ukrainian society.
“Voting behavior doesn’t change only through a media campaign,” Kolodii says. “We’ll continue to work with schools and teachers as well – they give slower but more systemic results.”
