Atlanta rap superstar Lil Jon’s epic performance of his classic “Turn Down for What” during the Georgia roll call at the Democratic National Convention in August wouldn’t have happened without veteran social impact strategist Ashley Spillane. After seeing the “from the window to the Walz” memes about Kamala Harris’ vice-presidential pick Tim Walz (a play on Lil Jon’s 2003 hit “Get Low”) go viral, Spillane got to work. Drawing on both her pop culture and political connections, Spillane — who served as president of Rock the Vote, the nonprofit formed in 1990 to increase turnout among 18 to 24-year-old voters — was able to join forces with Lil Jon’s longtime publicist Tamar Juda as well as key members of the Harris and DNC team to create one of the political season’s buzziest moments.
Linking pop culture to civic responsibility has long been a sweet spot for Spillane, who founded her D.C.-based social impact and creative agency Impactual in 2016. Since then, the firm has worked on a myriad of initiatives, particularly during the 2020 election. To address poll worker shortages during the pandemic, for example, Impactual helped deliver 1.4 million snacks to voters stuck in interminable lines at 3,265 polling places across the country through a national food truck program, “Democracy is Delicious,” and by facilitating an UberEats partnership. Impactual’s efforts have generated over 100 media placements across the ideological spectrum — from Time to Fox News. And the firm has worked with more than 40 celebrities, including Lady Gaga and Tracee Ellis Ross, on endorsements.
This election season, Spillane has expanded her company by adding a new entertainment division that will work “directly with athletes, artists and celebrities to advise and support them in building their own social responsibility and civic engagement initiatives,” she says. The division will also work with nonprofit organizations to connect them with prominent cultural figures who can help “uplift their causes.”
To assist in this expansion, Spillane has tapped Marc Keiser, who has dressed pro athletes in Keiser Clark, the fashion brand he co-founded, as director of athlete and artist engagement, and former Michael B. Jordan chief of staff CiCi James as director of artist and celebrity engagement.
“I started Impactual because I saw this amazing power that cultural institutions have, ranging from really large employers to celebrities to social media platforms, [in] driving positive change in the world,” Spillane says.
Spillane was introduced to community engagement and civic responsibility as a child, in West Hyannisport, Massachusetts. “I remember going to meetings and helping my parents, who were like street captains, deliver flyers to the houses about upcoming meetings or an ice cream social at the beach,” she says. “It wasn’t really canvassing door to door for a candidate or anything, but, from a really young age, I was excited about being an organizer. I was like seven or eight [when] I started a little town newspaper for our neighborhood. I would sit outside the post office and give it out.” She also recruited her peers to form the junior newsroom and deliver the paper. That continued at her small Catholic high school where she got diverse friend groups and small businesses alike to support her many causes.
She attended George Washington University in D.C., where she was drawn to foreign affairs, thanks to a beloved cousin in the foreign service, who her family visited in Senegal among other far-flung locations. Getting accepted into the school’s women’s leadership program and living in a women’s dorm, where she interacted with Muslim and Arab women post-9/11 and at the start of the Iraq War, made her see “the impact domestic elections could have on the international community.”
“I was contemplating an internship in Jordan during the summer of 2004 when a mentor told me if I really wanted to have an impact on Middle East policy, I should work on a presidential campaign. So I did,” she says. Spillane delayed her graduation and volunteered for John Kerry’s presidential campaign, which set her life on a new course. In the (then) battleground states of Ohio and Florida, Spillane says she “fell in love with our political process and liked being out there and talking to voters and helping everybody have their voice heard, and I’ve been doing that ever since, which is crazy, because it’s 20 years later.”
Serving as president of Rock the Vote from 2014 to 2016 “was such an eye-opening experience” for Spillane, who combined her love for music, pop culture and politics to effect change at a grassroots level. Riffing off Lil Jon’s then relatively recent hit, Spillane and her team pulled off the momentous “Turn Down for What” concert in Atlanta for the 2014 midterm elections headlined by then emerging rappers Rich Homie Quan and Young Thug. Though Lil Jon did not perform, he was visible through Rock the Vote commercials and other outreach efforts. But that concert showed Spillane what social capital could achieve. Not only did the show bring out a huge crowd of young people, many of them marginalized, but the two rappers also registered to vote, giving their fans cover to follow suit. Under Spillane’s watch, Rock the Vote also got Kendall Jenner to register to vote on Instagram. Spillane is credited for revitalizing the organization through digital marketing campaigns and other efforts in the vein of the viral Turn Out for What campaign.
For Spillane, nothing illustrated the potential political influence of cultural figures better than Donald Trump’s successful pivot from businessman and Apprentice reality star to president. “I think Trump winning in 2016 made people realize not just the impact pop culture can have, but also that they could have,” she says. The success of Trump’s incendiary presidential bid led indirectly to Impactual’s first big break. NBCUniversal cable boss Bonnie Hammer contracted the company, says Spillane, because “she wanted to bring back the Erase the Hate campaign to try to combat the rise [of] really harmful rhetoric, actions and some violence after the 2016 election.”
Joining forces with philanthropic partner Democracy Fund, Impactual helped Hammer and her team “identify the right nonprofit partners,” Spillane says. And they “worked with the company’s social impact team to create a research-based strategic plan and supported the creative agency on PSA content creation.”
Throughout 2024, Spillane has continued to demonstrate the effectiveness of using celebrities and influencers to engage the youth. In addition to the viral Lil Jon DNC moment broadcast nationwide, her bipartisan nonprofit — the Civic Responsibility Project — organized Party to the Polls The Purple Tour across 16 states, many of them battleground areas, with the main goal of getting people excited about the electoral process. The tour’s 50 events covered a range of activities, including voting, voter registration, obtaining absentee ballots and more. Poll workers were also celebrated.
With election season (almost) over, Spillane is ramping up the new entertainment division, the client list for which she promises to reveal in time. “Artists, athletes and celebrities are incredibly talented individuals and experts in their respective fields, but social impact work may be new and uncharted territory for them. That’s where we come in,” she says, identifying the need. “We’re able to blend our skills in social responsibility and civic engagement with their desire to create change — and we know how to turn their ideas into actual impact.”
After a decade of experience of leveraging celebrity to serve a higher calling, not to mention 20 years of grassroots civic engagement expertise, Spillane is still excited about the future. Having a daughter has been her personal gamechanger. “We have to do more. We have to fight harder for everybody’s kids,” she says. Now she never questions her why at Impactual: “We’re going to do this for her.”
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