Letícia Medeiros – Elas no Poder co-founder and Im.pulsa General Coordinator
Let’s begin this text by bringing a hypothetical reflection: if you were responsible for coordinating an election campaign starting tomorrow, would you know where to start from? Until 2019, when searching for this type of content on Google, you would probably find: difficult-to-understand (and politically biased) political brochures or expensive political marketing courses. Furthermore, if you decided to read any of these political brochures or pay for a course, you would quickly notice that all the content would only apply to male candidates with a lot of money to spend on the campaign.
After all, any “tip” on how to campaign for elections that starts with “you need to hire professionals with expertise A or B” no longer applies to most women’s campaigns reality.
That is, access to knowledge on how to conduct an electoral campaign was still not very democratized, both in Brazil and in other Latin American countries. In addition, there was no knowledge production about practices, strategies and learning from electoral campaigns carried out by women, with little resources and little political support. It was in this context that Elas no Poder, in partnership with Update Institute, launched Im.pulsa – a free online platform that helps women produce winning electoral campaigns. In 2020, the website was launched in Brazil. Currently, Im.pulsa is growing as a political learning community, also present in Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Argentina.
The Im.pulsa contents aim to encourage women’s knowledge and participation in institutional politics and, support them in their electoral campaigns organization. We want to see women moving politics in Latin America!
Since its launch, until the end of 2021, Im.pulsa had more than 60 thousand unique users accessing the platform. Upon receiving Pulsante’s support, our challenge was to diversify the platform’s content in Brazil and also diversify the access origins. We wanted Im.pulsa Brazil to be known in all country’s regions. In 2022, we can say that we made progress in the following areas: content production, content format, reach and audience.
Regarding content production, at the beginning of the year, we published an announcement and selected women interested in contributing to the platform. The selection was exclusive for women who declared themselves to be black, indigenous, quilombola, peripheral, LBTQIAP+ and/or PWD. In addition, we also prioritize women from the Midwest, North and Northeast regions of the country. The announcement received 114 applications and, based on it we produced 16 new contents.
In addition to content production, the project also advanced in relation to the format. For the first time, we produced materials for podcasts and created a community on Whatsapp.
The podcast Elas Podem Ser Eleitas, had six episodes in partnership with the collective Elas Podem. The episodes were intended to bring experiences and reflections on various relevant topics to the campaign preparation period. The recordings had the participation of several guests, among them: Tainah Pereira, from Mulheres Negras Decidem, and Dandara Lima, from Todaz na Política.
With the Whatsapp community creation, our intention was to attract campaign teams to the group. We currently have over 200 participants with over 40% of them active. This public choice was right and, observing the interactions, we assess that there is an important work space to train and prepare more women for the different roles in an electoral campaign, already focusing on the 2024 elections.
Another important advance to report concerns the reach. This year, the platform broke a reach record, reaching more than 125 thousand users in Brazil alone and also reaching all Brazilian states. In addition to the quantitative reach, we also had a qualitative leap: we expanded our network of partner organizations by financing face-to-face training meetings.
These face-to-face meetings took place before the official campaign period. We have financed meetings from 10 organizations and movements that work to strengthen the candidacies of black, indigenous and quilombola women in the North, Northeast and Midwest regions. In all, there were more than 188 participants in the meetings and more than 37 applications were impacted.
Finally, during the election period we had the opportunity to expand our public. Until then, Im.pulsa has always had a greater focus on dialoguing with candidates and campaign teams. During the elections, we produced a new batch of content aimed to female voters in Brazil. We understand that opening dialogue with women voters is an important step towards this movement that we want to see in Latin American politics. After all, one of the ways to motivate and attract more women to institutional politics is by bringing knowledge and information about the political system and democracy.
In the future, we want Im.pulsa to be able to collaborate with women in all their stages of political engagement: from learning basic concepts, to their victorious campaigns and mandates.
