During the 2018 midterm elections, more women ran for office than ever before in United States history. To celebrate this historic moment, we teamed up with Netflix and the creators of House of Cards to make a data-visualization tracking tool and supplementary content. The result? A highly relevant, insightful, and interactive activation that helped share a unique spin on the election, and answered questions like What does it take for a woman to succeed as a politician? And How can we make the woman’s “wave” last beyond election season?

This program created excitement for House of Cards’ female president season by harnessing the national momentum of the female wave during the midterms.

This dynamic, multi-faceted program consisted of distinct phases. Each phase consisted of a suite of content and promotion was designed to ensure that whoever was clicking on it or reading it was seeing relevant information.

Our goals were to create a real-time election tracker that showed women running for seats during the 2018 midterms, while partnering with a relevant organization to help build awareness of the program. In a first-to-market execution, our content studio designed and executed a tracker that showed the status of all women running for congress before, during, and after Election Day. We updated it in real time throughout Election Day (and in the weeks that followed, until all results were in).

PHASE 1: Pre-Election Day—The Election Tracker showed which seats in the House and Senate women were running for, alongside a series of data boxes. To give the tracker in-depth context, we conducted an interview with She Should Run founder Erin Loos and published a think piece about what House of Cards creators got right about Claire Underwood, featuring quotes from expert analysts and political strategists.

PHASE 2: Election Day—On Election Night, an interdisciplinary team of writers, developers, and fact-checkers updated the tracker live as soon as winners were announced.

PHASE 3: Post-Election Day—This phase featured final election results in the days and weeks that followed, updated stat boxes, a new headline and display text, and a post-mortem with She Should Run about ways to maintain the “women’s wave” momentum for the future. Immediately following the election, we conducted follow-up interviews with experts and analysts to report on what happened and published insights about the historic impact.

Throughout, we made sure everything we were publishing was in sync with the compelling and engaging themes touched on in the sixth season of Nettlix’s House of Cards. Though intricate to execute, the content appeared seamless, and showed how a campaign and storytelling could dovetail in exactly the right way at just the right time.