Summary
Our grantmaking is led by a team of national and state advisors, each with years of experience in local, state, and national organizing, movement building, and political strategy.
Our year-round grantmaking takes place in four steps:
- Targeting the most pivotal places and races, both now and long-term.
- Vetting via talent scouting, rigorous assessment, and reference checks.
- Allocation based on ongoing national and state-level analysis and strategy.
- Evaluation via ongoing interaction, annual reviews, and empirical research (often in collaboration with partners and allies).
Geographic Targeting
In each election cycle, we identify the geographies most in critical need of investment.
- In each geography, we weigh key races, including the Presidency, US Senate seats, US House seats, state executive races, state chamber flip opportunities, key local races (e.g., city councils, school boards), and ballot measures.
- We draw on in-depth political analysis and aggregated polling, coupled with the insights from our national and state advising teams.
- Where possible, we look for investment opportunities with multiple and layered key electoral races.
- Based on our analysis of electoral priorities and organizational capacity, we cluster states in prioritized groupings and develop individual state-by-state investment targets.
- We work to thoughtfully balance the critical need to make hard choices on how to deploy limited financial resources for the greatest impact, while not writing off any community, and we develop investment strategies that work towards achieving critical wins this cycle and building power long-term for future opportunities.
Organizational Focus
Our work is grounded in supporting organizations that do year-round local organizing and voter mobilization work during election cycles, with a strong emphasis on youth, immigrant, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities.
We focus on local organizations rooted in their community, led by people who reflect that community and those most impacted by the injustices we seek to transform. These include:
- Established organizations, issue-specific and constituency-specific networks,
- Growing organizations leaning into electoral work for the first time, and
- Emerging groups recently formed or on the cusp of launching.
We have built an extensive database of 500+ movement groups involved in voter engagement and turnout, and we are constantly scouting for additional groups alongside our state advisors and movement partners.
Issue Focus
Instead of imposing policy positions and priorities from the top down, we support our partners to pursue their own agenda from the bottom up. By focusing on the local issues people care about most, our partners give them a reason to vote — and to stay involved 365 days a year.
As a result of this bottom-up approach, MVP partners work on a wide array of intersecting focus areas, including voting rights, climate, racial justice, economic justice, education, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive justice, healthcare, immigrant rights, and more.
Our national and state advising team proactively talent-scouts local groups; assesses the quality and scope of their electoral and year-round organizing work as well as their organizational health; and conducts deep, multi-point reference checks using insights from key movement leaders, national and in-state organizers, peer funders, and other allied organizations.
As we develop a comprehensive list of possible groups to support in the states they oversee, we build profiles of each group and work to answer several key questions:
- Quality of vote work: Are they doing well-targeted vote work? How is their voter engagement strategy planned and implemented? Are their goals achievable? How do they track their progress? Are they developing new strategies or experimenting with new approaches to voter persuasion or mobilization?
- Synergy between electoral work and year-round organizing: How do they connect their vote work to year-round organizing and power-building efforts? How do their mobilization efforts feed into building ongoing community engagement? Have they shown success with translating electoral victories into policy, regulatory, or other reforms directly benefiting their communities, or do they have plans to do so?
- Constituency and issue priorities: Who does the group organize, represent, and engage? What issues are they working on? Are they working in underfunded communities or with people of color? Are they youth-led? Does their leadership reflect the communities they work in?
- Place in the movement ecosystem: What role do they play within the local, state, and national movement ecosystem? We generally categorize each potential group in one of three roles: leader, established, or emerging. We feel it is critical to invest in all types of groups and so aim to understand if they are a leader or anchor of the work, an established key player in one or more movement networks, the only one engaged in a particular community or issue, a new and emerging group, or serving in another role. How might supporting their work impact other groups?
- Financial need and growth potential: What is their budget for their planned vote work, and how much remains to be raised? What capacity do they have to scale with additional funding? Is there evidence that they will be good stewards of the funding they receive?
We establish priorities for each state, region, and grantee partner based upon our overall national goals and the state of play nationally and state-by-state, as well as the mobilization capacity, potential impact, and financial need of each group in the context of local, statewide, and national movement ecosystems.
MVP works closely with other funder partners to get a full picture of how investments are being made and make sure we are doing the best job to fill critical gaps that may not be prioritized by other partners.
We are continuously evaluating how much each state ecosystem needs, how much MVP and other funders have already given to a state, and where there are crucial investment gaps.
We evaluate our local partners' strategies and impact through ongoing on-the-ground assessment, annual reporting, and empirical evidence by allied research organizations.
On-the-Ground Assessment
Throughout the year, our team routinely monitors and interacts with groups to more deeply understand their strengths and growth areas and proactively supports them in continuous improvement.
Annual Reporting
Each year, we review plans, budgets, and reports on the progress of all groups that we have supported. We also review plans and budgets for new and emerging groups on an ongoing basis.
Our Annual Reporting Form covers quantitative measures of impact related to voter registration and get-out-the-vote contacts, as well as more detailed, qualitative information on organizational development and issue-organizing campaigns.
View our sample End-of-Year Reporting Form »
Empirical Research
There is a growing body of empirical research validating our organizing-based approach. We’ve compiled a primer here.
MVP is a member of a renowned research consortium, Analyst Institute, whose randomized control trials (RCTs) and other findings we use to corroborate the effectiveness of our local partners’ voter engagement tactics. Analyst Institute has conducted experiments with several MVP grantee partners, many of which you can read about in this piece.
Additionally, we draw inspiration from groups like the Democracy & Power Innovation Fund to spread the use of “power metrics” that holistically capture both qualitative and quantitative measures of power-building work.