November 2024 Impact Report

Metrics

GrowSF reached every voter in San Francisco. From postal mail, to digital ads, to TV and YouTube, we made sure that every voter knew where we stood. 181,000 voters came to our website, which comprises just over 44% of all voters in this election. When combined with our postal mail and video outreach, we think every voter was aware of GrowSF and our endorsed candidates.

And we did all of this at a fraction of what the other guys spend. Our total budget for this election was $1.8M. Of that, $1.1M was spent promoting our complete voter guide and $685k was spent on ads for our Supervisor candidates.

How We Did It

We run a rigorous process to identify the best candidates: each candidate for every office gets a long questionnaire that asks the important questions. We look for candidates who prioritize good government, building more housing, creating great public schools, ensuring public safety, and fostering growth. And they must share our San Francisco values.

A core belief of GrowSF is that voters just want high quality information on what they're voting for. Instead of relying on expensive political consultants, we do all our research in house. In total, we produced hundreds of pages of candidate interviews, financial analyses, and no-frills policy analysis to help voters make informed decisions.

We got information in front of as many people as possible, both organically and through ads, across all six supervisorial districts. While we did not win every district, we succeeded in delivering the most well-researched voter guide in the City.

500k+

voters reached through direct mail

181k

unique visitors to our online voter guide

14 variants

English and Chinese, 6 districts, 1 citywide

Print Creative

This year’s volume of political mail was unprecedented. Mailboxes were stuffed with flyers for ballot measures and candidates. We knew that voters would be overwhelmed with printed ads, and it is nearly impossible to stand out while not annoying voters. So instead of creating glossy mailers that go straight from the mailbox to the recycling bin, we focused on no-frills high information mail. And based on our past research, we know our mail gets opened.

We sent our voter guide to every voter in San Francisco twice, and did so in a plain envelope. While we did send a single glossy flyer, but it focused on a single issue so that it would be clear to voters what our candidate stood for.

12 billboards

Districts 1 and 5

16 issues

Policy positions across multiple candidates

28 variants

English and Chinese, multiple pieces

Digital Creative

Voters spend a lot of time online: searching for information on candidates, deciding how to vote for propositions, and finding out who their friends vote for. What has also become clear is that voters are saturated with online content about who to vote for.

We focused on providing voters with new and useful information about several under-the-radar races, and which candidates met their preferences. Additionally, we ran some of the earliest online campaigns in San Francisco with the intention of informing voters before the deluge began.

We created all of our Meta ads in house and had 21.3 million impressions across hundreds of creative variants. We produced 23 candidate videos for our YouTube ads, which totaled 9.68 million impressions.

Citywide ads

Our citywide video ads sought to do one thing: tell voters that GrowSF makes the ballot easy to understand, and that we're a helpful resource.

District 3 ads

For Danny Sauter in District 3, we focused on quality of life improvements like more trash cans, public safety, and helping small businesses.

District 5 ads

For Bilal Mahmood in District 5, we drew a distinction between the incumbents and Mahmood on housing and drug policy. For example, the incumbent blocked thousands of new homes as Supervisor, while Mahmood pledges to help homebuilders build homes. On drugs, we contrasted the incumbent's do-nothing policy for fentanyl dealing and overdoses, and Mahmood's focus on solving these issues. Finally, we highlighted the fact that the Tenderloin, which is the center of the City's drug overdose crisis, is home to the highest density of children in the entire city.

Lessons Learned

Entrenched political interests mobilized roughly $2M to win districts 1 and 11, dwarfing the sums GrowSF spent supporting Marjan Philhour and Michael Lai. They spent $1.2M in D1 versus our $100k, and $700k vs our $100k in D11. The speed and scale at which they can mobilize money against reformer Democrats surprised us.

What really set us apart was our ability to do almost everything in house. We could go from an idea to a video launch on TV in just a couple hours. We did not farm our work out to expensive political consultants. We ran data-driven campaigns focused on informing as many voters as possible. Our speed and excellence on video is confirmed by the sheer number of people who say they saw our video ads in every Supervisor district.

What’s Next

Now that we have a commonsense majority on the Board of Supervisors, the hard part begins. We will work alongside our allies inside and outside of City Hall to support positive change in San Francisco. We will continue to push for legislation that people want, and work toward structural reforms to City government that empower the Mayor to actively manage departments while making Supervisors more responsive to their constituents.

For press inquiries, get in touch at contact@growsf.org

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