The NSW Local Government Election (LGE) faced a significant challenge: increasing multicultural audience voter turnout against declining trends and ensuring they knew how to make their vote count. The overall objective was to boost turnout beyond the previous LGE's 79.85%. Etcom's target audience was eligible multicultural NSW voters, specifically focusing on Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Greek, Italian, Korean, and Vietnamese language groups.
Etcom undertook a deep dive into data, segmenting multicultural communities into "Disconnected citizens," "Likely Non-voters," "Ready to vote," and "First Time voters." Overlaying this with previous LGE non-voter locations confirmed high non-voter rates in LGAs with large multicultural populations. This enabled us to identify the most effective communication and media channels for each segment and area. We collaborated with creative and media agencies, providing cultural reviews and recommendations to adapt creative, making it more relevant for multicultural audiences, many voting for the first time. Bespoke multicultural creative was then used in targeted media channels. The campaign's insight was that informed multicultural audiences, understanding the election process and consequences of not voting, would be motivated to participate. Despite a COVID-19 induced postponement, Etcom swiftly adapted, rescheduling media and activities across print, radio, digital, and social channels.
The campaign successfully reached and engaged target multicultural audiences with in-language materials online and offline. Ultimately, voter turnout reached 83.05%, an increase against previous LGE and State Government Elections, defying declining trends. Our multicultural results were strong: print achieved 639,000+ estimated reach, WeChat delivered over 31,000 advertorial views (well above forecast), and Facebook showed a strong 1.05% CTR with over 2.1 million impressions. Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean communities showed the highest engagement. The integrated cross-platform model proved highly effective. This success demonstrates that adapted and bespoke creative, combined with accessible in-language information, was critical in driving significant participation among multicultural voters.