2024 - Winner for Distinguished Voter Education and Communications Initiatives

In 2024, the Ottawa elections team set the goal of interacting and engaging with the community through at least 20 various touchpoints. The objective was to use multiple mediums of communication to reach as wide an audience as possible. The office harnessed the conversational nature of a podcast to convey basic, intentional, accessible voter information in bite-sized clips. Elections staff filmed two- to four-minute clips on specific topics, including: ballot box security, early voting, election fraud and more. These clips were then edited and compiled in imitation of a larger podcast discussion titled Ballots & Banter. The result exceeded expectations: the recording process was fast and fun, the staff was able to collaborate, production was cheap, and, most importantly, it was effective.