Perhaps you look upon your organization’s elections and awards as simply yearly tasks that you and your staff must perform. But these events are noteworthy both for your organization and the winners, and they provide an easy opportunity for you to increase your organization’s brand.

The key to leveraging these events for your organization is the press release. Press releases today are no longer solely an attempt to get your organization’s name in print from mainstream media. Creating press releases to distribute via the web will increase your organization’s online presence and can help drive more traffic to your site.

Many organizations already put out a standard release announcing the new board of directors or award winners, but an extra step can lead to a much higher distribution of the message. By creating press releases for each of the winners of elections, awards, scholarships and other voting events, you can give your winners the tools they need to spread the news in their own networks.

A simple way to create individual press releases is to use a mail merge program to insert each winner’s information into a standard template. Then you can send the individual press releases to the winners with suggestions on where they can distribute the information, such as their alma matter, corporate communications department, local newspaper, industry magazines and more. In addition, you can share information about places to post press releases for free (such as this list from SubHub). If you don’t have the time or staff to create individual press releases, create a template that the winners can personalize and distribute.

Does your organization put out press releases for your elections or awards? How do you use the events to increase your brand?

A recent article in ASAE’s Associations Now magazine shared 33 Simple Ways to Build Member Loyalty. The list is well worth reading, and a few of their tips stand out in our world as great ways to engage members for the long haul. Here’s our take on a handful of tips:

• Tip #7: Ask Questions
  The authors advise associations to collect feedback from members on their needs, concerns, interests and views. Many associations with whom we work use online voting software to provide a secure, tamper-proof method for advisory voting and other polls. (Read “Online Voting Vs. Online Surveys: There Is a Difference“)
• Tip #19: Get Things Done Efficiently
  When it comes to voting for board elections, bylaw revisions and other propositions, members hate hassle. They want to be able to vote online with a seamless, integrated system that doesn’t involve multiple passwords and other roadblocks.
• Tip #20: Be Honest
  If an election or voting event has even a hint of scandal, you lose the trust of your voters. A verified, third-party online voting system can make your election tamper proof and scandal free.
• Tip #27: Personalize Your Communications
  Members don’t feel special when your invitation to participate in an election is addressed to “DEAR MEMBER.” Personalize your emails to make sure your members know the invitation is just for them, complete with their unique link for voting as well as username and password. In addition, you should make sure that your ballots can be customized to member types. (Read about the American Anthropological Association’s custom ballots here.)
• Tip #32: Acknowledge Achievements
  Your members work hard in their industries, and many associations offer awards for outstanding work. Simplify the process with an online contest/award management system that makes recognizing members easy.

What do you do to increase member loyalty? How has it affected your retention rate?

Does your organization offer industry awards to your members or constituents? According to a 2010 article on the Top 15 Association Trends, organizations are offering more awards than ever in an attempt to recognize industry leaders and create more connections with active members.

According to the article, “More than a few groups have developed recognition programs around competitions that engage members and sponsors and boost the impact of social responsibility initiatives.” For example,

The National Association of Letter Carriers organizes the largest one-day national food drive in the United States each May and tracks and honors chapters that gather the most donated food. And the American Bankers Association Foundation launched a successful contest in 2009 to reward one bank with $1,000 to donate to a local school if its employee volunteers educated the one millionth child participating in ABA’s annual Teach Children to Save campaign. The program has reached 3.4 million youth since 1997 with 80,000 bank volunteers teaching the importance of lifelong saving, but the contest has added extra zing.

What kind of contests and awards have you implemented, and how do you spread the news for nominations and entries? Do you use social media to promote your nomination process, or perhaps engage online voting into the contest to encourage member participation?

In many association elections, candidates fill out a written form and perhaps upload a headshot to help voters decide who to elect. But in today’s society where YouTube is the number two search engine after Google, associations that encourage candidates to create short intro videos can increase their presence on the web as well as generate buzz for the election.

When we asked our clients how they increased voter turnout in elections (See 22 Practical Ideas to Increase Voter Turnout), we discovered several associations helped their candidates create intro videos to help voters decide. The Special Libraries Association created SLA-TV to showcase candidate Q&A sessions, statements and other association video. They said the videos not only help the candidates come to life for the voters — they also show the members that SLA is on top of new technology.

A recent article in ASAE’s Communication News offered 10 Ways to Get More Out of Your Videos. We’ve respectfully borrowed some of the author’s tips to help your organization leverage candidate videos into bigger visibility.

1. Know Your Brand, Show Your Brand
   Give your candidates guidelines to create their videos, then use video editing software to add your organization’s logo and the name of the election. SLA helps candidates produce great videos by recording them at their annual conferences.  That way the videos look uniform and professional, and SLA controls the branding. Read the rest of this entry →

When an active association in the health care industry assigned an inhouse IT director to build an online voting system for their 2,000 members a decade ago, the members embraced the change. But in the next few years, the association doubled in size and the IT director moved on, and the staff discovered they lacked the time and knowledge to maintain the system.

Losing key staff to manage an inhouse online voting system is just one challenge organizations face when they try to use internal resources for their system. In fact, organizations often don’t realize the risk they’re taking when they don’t outsource the project.

Here’s our list of the top four reasons your organization should find a reliable online voting vendor for their elections and other voting events: Read the rest of this entry →

Ordinarily here at Voting 2.0 we stay away from talking specifically about Votenet-specific features, but a recent event has organizations asking a critical question: “If hackers can penetrate a government online election, can Votenet keep our organization’s voting event secure?”

In late 2010, the District of Columbia rolled out a pilot project to allow overseas and military voters to download and return absentee ballots over the internet. Before they sent invitations to real voters, they put the system online to invite the public to evaluate the system’s security and usability.

Within 36 hours, a team of hackers from the University of Michigan exploited a vulnerability that gave the students the ability to change votes and reveal secret ballots. The hack made headlines around the country when the students left a “calling card” to show that they had control of the server: after 15 seconds, the page played the University of Michigan fight song.

So how is Votenet’s system more secure? The leading security expert at The Hyperion Group noted that the pilot voting program and Votenet’s certified system have little in common. Read the rest of this entry →

Last year President Obama issued an executive memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, calling upon the heads of all government executive departments and agencies to “establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration.” U.S. agencies were required to publish Open Government Plans” that outlined each group’s efforts to “harness new technologies to put information about their operations online and readily available to the public.” Obama also called upon agencies to “solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.”

This directive has led many agencies to establish better methods of feedback for the public and to encourage participation. Although Regulations.Gov has been around since 2002, more than 300 agencies are now using it to let the public submit comments on nearly 8,000 regulations per year. And Challenge.Gov was launched early this fall to award prizes and recognition for public participation in providing ideas and solutions for today’s government problems, issues and initiatives. Read the rest of this entry →