• by October 28, 2004

With the presidential election just five days away, voters are gearing up to cast their ballots - some, for the very first time. While there have been more than a few voter registration drives over the past year, there is one that stands out for its extensive use of the Web, as well as tons of offline promotion, including college campus events, to get young people, primarily 18 to 29-year-olds, registered and pumped up to vote.

The non-partisan Declare Yourself, a non-profit youth voting campaign created by veteran TV producer/director Norman Lear, says it has helped direct more than a million people to download voter registration forms from Yahoo! The effort began a year ago, when Declare Yourself teamed up with Yahoo!'s community relations program. Yahoo! has partnered on many other public service programs but hasn't supported a voter registration program prior to its involvement with Declare Yourself. Yahoo! provided the online media placements and related development services gratis.

"Part of the reason Yahoo! decided to make this its first effort of this kind is because of our non-partisan status," Lear told The Minute. "Presidents Ford and Carter have co-chaired this from the beginning." Ford and Carter serve as honorary co-chairs of Declare Yourself. Lear, who owns one of 25 surviving copies of the Declaration of Independence, has taken the document on a 50-state road trip with Declare Yourself.

The voter registration program involved millions of "Register to Vote" banners that ran across Yahoo!'s network. Those banners drove traffic to DeclareYourself.com. The effort also got some of the best real estate in the business: five ads on Yahoo!'s coveted front page.

Yahoo! also built a microsite (vote.yahoo.com) that offered voters access to election news, information on local polling places, viral e-greetings for sending to family and friends to encourage them to vote, and other resources. Most unusual though, were the customized avatars that ran on Yahoo! Messenger where people could create graphical representations of themselves for voter awareness T-shirts that could be worn by their avatars. Also notable, the search term "Register to vote" was the most searched term on Yahoo! on Oct. 5.

On Oct. 19, downloads of the voter registration form reached one million. The numbers continued to rise up until the deadline, according to Lear.

How did Declare Yourself get hooked up with Yahoo!? Well, it's just as I thought - Yahoo! Chairman-CEO Terry Semel and Lear are long time friends. "When I told him about what I was doing, he told me I should get together with Meg Garlinghouse, [Yahoo!'s] director of community relations," Lear explains.

"For us, it was a perfect example [of a] professionally-run organization, and such an important cause," Garlinghouse says, "It's where our key strengths are in connecting users to causes and interests. It was a perfect match."

So what does Lear, the acclaimed producer of such TV hits as "All in the Family," "Maude," "The Jeffersons," and "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," think of the Web and the multimedia universe? "I've got 10-year-old twin daughters and a just turned 16-year-old son. I knew a lot about Yahoo! My kids are in touch with the world through Yahoo!" Spoken like a true fan and friend of Semel's.

"It's startling. Yahoo! puts [Declare Yourself] on the front page, and the next day, our numbers are off the charts. It's been absolutely stunning," Lear adds.