Campaigns are doing their best to get voters to turn out for this fall’s mid-term elections. But they're not the only ones.

Two Boston-based engineers developed an app that enables people to nudge their friends by text to tell them to go vote.

The founders, Nadeem Mazen and Naseem Makiya, launched their app Outvote last September.

It's different than other software that connects organizers with voters. With Outvote, the text comes from someone you know instead of someone you don't. And they believe a real-life friend is more likely to get a person to the polls than a text from an unknown number.

One of their users is 29-year-old Columbia University graduate student Aaron Schein, who believes that this mid-term election might be the most important election of his life. So he dedicates four to five hours every day to politics. He reads the news, tweets his opinions, creates threads and posts analysis.

And he texts his friends using Outvote.

“There is the potential for a lot of social pressure here because you would know exactly who of your friends is registered and who is not,” Schein said.

The app cross-references your contacts to public voter information, giving you an insight into your friends' voting behavior. If someone is registered as a Democrat, a blue capital 'D' appears next to their name. And if they rarely vote, a sleeping emoji will blow their cover.

“It is public information anyways, and so we can create a culture of getting people on you to make you register if you didn’t,” said Schein.

One catch: The app does not show Republican voters or candidates. Outvote is for Democrats and other progressives only.

“We want to create a brand that people are excited about and a community that wants do make a difference this September," founder Naseem Makiya explained. "It would be hard to build that serving both sides.”

Schein has more than a hundred contacts on his phone and he says he's already texted all of them. 

“People that don’t want to go door to door can do this in their bedroom — and they are still doing something,” he said. He said some of his friends have also downloaded the app, creating a partisan sort of snowball effect with Outvote.