Thanks for the write-up!

We do start each member with enough pending upvote balance to get an upvote right away, either their next post or sometimes their most recent if it's less than a day old when their enrollment is processed. After that there is quite some delay until the next vote. At the current STEEM prices, it takes a member with only 1 unit a full 28 days to get to each $0.012 upvote.

The best thing a new member can do to boost that (if they don't want to enroll at a higher subscription level) is to start upvoting @steembasicincome posts. Those reward an upvoting multiplier of 1.34x their upvote value (so if you upvote at $0.01, you would receive a boost to your balance of $0.0134 after that post pays out) and that goes a long way toward getting upvotes more frequently. Even members with tiny starter accounts can accumulate upvote value that way more quickly than almost anything else they could do with their limited voting power and SP.

(BTW, you are welcome to use our banner and link it to the FAQ when you write about Steem Basic Income). There is a code block for it in the FAQ if you're not already familiar with hyperlinking in html.