Empowering Faith Communities: How Texas Impact Boosted Civic Engagement through Data-Driven Solutions

Texas Impact is a statewide interfaith organization that brings together diverse people from across Texas to advocate for the common good. They equip faith leaders and their congregations with information, opportunities, and outreach tools to engage with lawmakers on pressing public issues and mobilize civic participation in their communities.  

As part of their civic engagement, many faith communities are involved in nonpartisan get-out-the-vote (GOTV) activities. While there is a widely shared perception that faith communities are effective messengers for GOTV, measuring the impact of specific GOTV activities has proven challenging. Lack of data about the effectiveness of faith-based GOTV work can suppress funding.

In March 2024, Texas Impact was investigating strategies for measuring the impact of GOTV activities when Executive Director, Bee Moorhead discovered SureImpact and our collaborative model.

“I could see right away that SureImpact was the missing piece of a puzzle that’s frustrated nonprofit advocates and funders across the country,” Moorhead said. “We know faith communities are trusted messengers, and nonpartisan GOTV is something faith communities across a wide religious spectrum engage in. We believe those activities have the potential to empower voters, but we’ve never had a platform that collects granular data about GOTV interactions in a form that can crosswalk to actual county voter turnout reports. SureImpact offers a powerful combination of sophisticated data and volunteer-friendly user interface.”

A Pilot Program

Texas Impact leadership determined that SureImpact was the perfect fit for a new faith-based GOTV pilot program they were about to roll out called Houston Faith Votes. SureImpact would simplify data collection, reporting, and analysis for each pilot site, and give Texas Impact insights into the success of their efforts overall, including helping to identify specific GOTV activities that showed the most benefit in mobilizing voters.

Houston Faith Votes mobilizes diverse faith communities across the Greater Houston area to promote civic engagement and ensure everyone has the information they need to make an informed vote. In the pilot program, Texas Impact served as the backbone organization for the collective impact collaborative, with 16 local faith communities participating.

In July 2024, SureImpact’s onboarding team met with leaders from Texas Impact and from the 16 pilot sites to discuss the plan for collecting data, how Texas Impact would use the data, and how they would share results and recommendations for the most-effective ways to increase voter participation.

“Something that was tremendously helpful as we started the pilot was the amazing support we received from SureImpact,” said Rebecca McIlwain, Houston Faith Votes Project Manager for Texas Impact. “SureImpact helped us set up our data collection requirements and then trained each congregation to ensure they felt confident collecting data in SureImpact.”

The SureImpact onboarding team gave each pilot site access to their own SureImpact environment with the pre-determined data-collection requirements for the pilot project. Each individual organization also had access to SureImpact Analytics dashboard to view the results of their voter engagement efforts. That data automatically rolled up to the Texas Impact Collective Impact dashboard. Texas Impact was able to view the results of all pilot sites on their Collective Impact dashboard, and they could drill down and look at each organization individually.

“The power of SureImpact is in the data,” said McIlwain. “This pilot has shown us what actually increases voter engagement. It also is helping determine how we will shape the next phase of our work.”

Going Forward

Texas Impact already has plans to expand their work into additional regions across Texas. They have been approached by two other voter engagement collaboratives who are interested in the data-driven model used for Houston Faith Votes.

“SureImpact helped us interpret the data from the Houston Faith Votes pilot,” said McIlwain. “We determined the top 5 activities that drive voter participation, with #1 being texting members of your congregation. We are excited to take what we have learned from the data and expand civic engagement across Texas.”

SureImpact is honored to partner with Texas Impact and other advocacy organizations striving to better their communities.

Read the full case study here.