Yes23
Learn about how Code Nation created the campaign and volunteer infrastructure for Australia's largest ever mobilisation.
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Our work
by
Yolanda Forsyth
· July 21, 2020 10:43 AM
We had the pleasure of working closely with the Yes23 Campaign Team and we support their mission for constitutional recognition for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
In 2023, Australians voted in a referendum about whether to change the Consitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing a body called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. The website we developed for the “Yes” campaign based on their design mockups needed to not only help raise awareness and engage voters, but also support the recruitment and mobilisation of volunteers nation-wide as part of the largest ever grassroots volunteer campaign of its kind. It also needed to work seamlessly with our volunteer management software, SupporterBase, which would provide the backbone of the distributed organising effort.
This campaign inspired a whole new cohort of passionate citizens to become volunteer leaders, and it was made possible by the online space we helped them create. People used the Yes23 website to search for local campaign groups via map functionality, and if one didn’t already exist, they could start their own local group by completing a simple online form. They could also find or list their own local events on the website through an automated event submission and publication process. Once local groups were set up online, volunteer leaders used our integrated volunteer management platform, SupporterBase, to send SMS and email blasts, manage call lists, and publish events themselves directly to the Yes23 website. Local groups formed quickly across the country, and started recruiting and organising communications and activities to best suit their respective areas and demographics. Within weeks, there were 276 local groups established, with 55,067 active and engaged volunteers working tirelessly to campaign for the Yes vote.
Although the Yes campaign did not ultimately succeed (with Yes votes at referendums in Australia notoriously difficult to win, especially without bipartisan support from major parties) the volunteer mobilisation element was a key bright spot in the broader campaign, and national organisers of the Yes campaign (which included only a handful of full time staff with little more than a few months to prepare), said they still hit all of their field organising goals and they simply would not have been able to achieve this style of distributed organising, nor this level of scale without our website and digital tools.
Our work with the Yes23 campaign was recognised at the 2024 Reed Awards, winning the award for Best Grassroots Website.
