After the results of the 28 May 2023 election in Spain and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s announcement of snap general elections for 23 July, at the peak of the high tide of a rancid suffocating conservative wave, there was nothing we could think of that would be better to do than work on a campaign to pull the progressive vote away from their swimming pools to vote.

Demos Lab, a centre for democratic innovation, contacted Viernes to create a campaign to generate voter turnout, stressing the importance of climate policies as a safeguard for our future.

As a starting point, we used studies with data on apathetic abstention which, unlike political or rational abstention, involves those who feel they can’t be bothered or are uninterested in elections or in politics in general. Among this group, which we segmented into different profiles and ages, was progressive voter intention that we needed to mobilize, beginning by putting the accent on a call to vote by mail, a key for these elections falling in the middle of the summer vacation.  

We built the concept of linking voting by mail to the most positive aspects of the summer. But the idea conveyed wasn’t ‘vote and forget about everything’. We didn’t subscribe to that bare minimum mindset.  Democracy is, or at least it should be, much more than voting once every four years. We used a simple, fun, summery concept to bring out that abstentionist vote by sustaining that voting is the least one can do in a democracy.

That is how the campaign #MójateyVota, (Take a dip and Vote) came about, a project that, as life’s circumstances would have it, we had to conceive and produce in just 5 days. Fortunately, Manila Films helped us get the audio-visual done in less than the time it takes to drop a vote in a ballot box.

This campaign was linked to a fair number of communications actions unified under the platform #UrnayToalla (Ballot box and towel) and an endless number of stellar collaborations from content creators, publicists, community managers, journalists and communicators in general, who all weighed in to get out the vote.

If this fundamental right for democratic participation is not exercised, there’s nothing left to do and much to bemoan. No, it DOES matter, and not all politics or all politicians are the same.