Prior to his inaugurations in 2009 and 2013, Barack Obama called for Americans to join in a day of service on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Citizens were encouraged to get involved with their community by planting trees, feeding the hungry, cleaning up schools, and more. This event emphasized the importance of giving back.

In 2021 President-Elect Joe Biden chose to bring back the Presidential Inaugural Committee’s involvement in the National Day of Service. The Presidential Inaugural Committee hosted and promoted events using Mobilize, offering a central destination for participants and event hosts around the country to recruit and engage volunteers.

This year’s National Day of Service safely brought communities together; 57% of the events were held virtually. Over 73,300 volunteers from around the country volunteered for more than 143,000 shifts to give back to their communities.

The Mobilize network

By using Mobilize, the Presidential Inaugural Committee was able to automate much of the recruitment process. Ultimately, 41.5% of shifts came from the Mobilize network. This amounts to nearly 60,000 additional signups with no additional effort!

21% of shifts came from automated suggestions, which help to re-engage supporters after their first signup, keeping them coming back for additional engagements with the organization. Nearly 9% of shifts were from bring-a-friend prompts, where supporters invite their personal networks to an event or action they’re attending.

Mobilize’s promotion feature also contributed to the total number of signups. This feature allows organizations to promote other organizations’s events on their dashboards. The event was promoted by 37 other organizations on their Mobilize feeds, helping to boost awareness in new audiences. This contributed 11% of all signups—that’s 15.2k shifts! The top promoter was the central Mobilize.us feed, which drove 6,237 signups. Crooked Media and the DNC also drove significant additional shifts (4,003 and 3,634, respectively).

Learn more about how Mobilize recruits for you

Event planning using Mobilize

Prior to Mobilize, the National Day of Service required large-scale outreach and organization. The Presidential Inaugural Committee had to manually research and contact local organizations all over the country. Each event would have to individually track volunteer numbers that would later be manually totaled, and representatives from the committee would be stationed around the country to oversee efforts.

When the Presidential Inaugural Committee used Mobilize to schedule their National Day of Service, they could give multiple members of the team access to event creation and volunteer information. The team was able to easily coordinate and collaborate virtually. While they still had to manually do some outreach to organizations, they were able to easily promote any organizations hosting events on Mobilize. The collaboration between groups made it easy to collect data for events around the country, which was a game changer!

While the committee hosted 147 events, most of the 2,645 total events were hosted by their 2,965 volunteer hosts. Using Mobilize’s event campaign capabilities, the Presidential Inaugural Committee gave volunteer leaders the ability to create and host their own events. This allowed community leaders to channel volunteers into projects that would have the most impact on their area. It also allowed more than 300 organizations to work with the Presidential Inaugural Committee.