Patagonia put $11.2 million behind a bet that friends, not strangers, are what turn environmentally minded Americans into voters. The outdoor apparel company's 11.2 Million Vote Project, which launched Sept. 26, offered $100 in Patagonia credit or a $100 donation to the League of Conservation Voters to anyone who sent a voting plan to at least three friends or family members, according to Fortune's Tatiana Sataua.
The incentive budget was exhausted in four days. By Sept. 30, more than 112,000 people had signed up, and the company says nearly 500,000 people, counting participants and the friends they reached, now have plans to vote in this year's midterms. "Offering a meaningful incentive was a game changer," Corley Kenna, Patagonia's chief communications and impact officer, told Fortune, adding that without it the company likely would have taken much longer to hit its goals, if it reached them at all.
Closing the gap between caring and voting
The campaign is built on research from the nonprofit Environmental Voter Project, which found that 11.2 million registered voters who identify as environmentalists sat out the 2024 presidential election — the figure behind the project's name and budget. EVP founder Nathaniel Stinnett told Fortune that when his organization asks people how they'd address issues like immigration or education, they tend to propose political solutions. On climate change, personal solutions — recycling, changing what they buy — outnumber political ones roughly four to one. "We're not going to recycle our way out of the climate crisis," Stinnett said, arguing that many environmentally concerned Americans simply don't connect their concern to the ballot box.
EVP's approach leans on peer influence rather than persuasion. "Your friends carry much more of a social impact on what your behavior is or ought to be than a stranger does," Stinnett said. Participants used Patagonia's voting-plan app to generate personalized plans for contacts, who could be matched against public voter files for accurate registration information; friends were not required to actually register or vote for participants to collect the reward.
A legal gray area, and an open question on impact
Because the payout was tied to outreach rather than to a friend's registration or vote, the structure sidesteps federal laws against paying people to register or cast a ballot. Columbia University political scientist Donald Green, a pioneer of field experiments on voter turnout, compared the arrangement to a gig-economy job: Patagonia was "essentially hiring people as temp workers, as temp political workers," he told Fortune, calling the midterms a particularly good venue for this kind of push since lower-turnout midterm voters may be more persuadable than habitual presidential-year voters.
Temple University political scientist David Nickerson cautioned that reaching close to 500,000 people doesn't mean the campaign created that many new voters, since volunteers' social circles often already vote. "You can't mobilize your friends who will already vote," he said, suggesting the $100 credit may do more to draw in younger, lower-turnout customers with less disposable income. Measuring the campaign's true effect, he added, would require a randomized study comparing outreach recipients against a control group using public voting records.
The push also doubles as a flashpoint in Patagonia's long-running fight over federal land policy. The company says 90 million acres of public lands are under threat, and it joined a coalition in September challenging the Trump administration's July reduction of Utah's Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments — reviving a legal battle it also fought during Trump's first term. CEO Ryan Gellert told Axios that voter apathy is "probably the single biggest thing that concerns me right now."