In our series on Practical Ideas to Increase Voter Turnout, one of the ways that organizations are making it easier for voters to vote is to build a single-sign-on system that connects your members-only website with your online ballot. A single-sign-on system streamlines the online voting process by allowing voters to use familiar logins and passwords without having to memorize new information or enter a completely different system.

This helps cut down on things a voter has to keep track of and takes away a potential barrier to voting. An advanced online voting software provider (like Votenet, if we may be honest) will integrate with your organization’s association management system (AMS), connecting the voting process with the database of members and potential voters. That way voters can login through a familiar system and immediately connect with the electronic ballot.

According to Wikipedia, benefits of using a single sign-on system include:

• Reducing opportunities for phishing because users are not trained to enter password everywhere without thinking
• Reducing password fatigue from different user name and password combinations
• Reducing time spent re-entering passwords for the same identity
• Reducing IT costs due to lower number of IT help desk calls about passwords
• Security on all levels of entry/exit/access to systems without the inconvenience of re-prompting users
• Centralized reporting for compliance adherence as well as website traffic monitoring

The bottom line is that organizations need to reduce as many barriers to voting as possible, including the hoops voters need to jump through before voting. How do you streamline the voting process for your voters?

Are your award ceremonies boring for everyone except the award winners? The members of the American Society of Association Executives recently used their discussion groups to share ideas on how to make award ceremonies more engaging for the winners and the audience. At Votenet, we’ve seen lots of award ceremonies end up too long, too boring and too much. Here are five quick ways to ensure your award ceremonies keep everyone entertained.

1. Choose the Master of Ceremonies carefully.
   Your MC should be engaging, comfortable in front of an audience and cognizant of the time.  If the board president is usually the MC but lacks the ability to engage the audience, perhaps use another person as the MC and let the board president hand the award to the recipient.
2. Create a tight script and stick to it.
   Write out the information you need to read about each award and winner, and then cut the text in half! Keep the stage time summaries to only the bare necessities, and put the rest of the details about the winners and the awards on your site and in press releases.
3. Make sure the potential winners are close to the stage and have easy access.
   When the winner’s name is called, he or she should have a clear path to the stage and shouldn’t have to come from the back of the banquet hall or wind through tight tables from the center of the room. Also, make sure the potential winners know who will take the stage if they win — you don’t want 5 people from one company scrambling from all areas of the room to get onstage — just ask 1-2 representatives from each group to accept the award.
4. Prep for the post-award photos.
   Instead of having the award winners pose onstage with the board chair for a photo while the audience waits, have a photo area offstage immediately after the ceremony. That way you can take more care with the backdrop and lighting, and you won’t have to slow down the ceremony for the photo opps.
5. Limit the winners’ speeches to a minute or less.
   If your winners are allowed to say a few words after they receive an award, give them strict guidelines on how long they have. A minute or less keeps the ceremony flowing nicely. You can always ask the winners to craft a statement for your website or the press release after the event.

What other ideas do you have to make your awards ceremonies more entertaining and inspirational for the audience?

Many organizations think online voting is just for governance, but some organizations are using online voting to generate buzz in other departments.

A clever idea from the National Cooperative Business Association: they’ve created an online voting contest to ask attendees for their upcoming conference to vote on the speaker for the final breakout session at the NCBA Annual Meeting and Conference.

Speakers can nominate themselves via a written proposal or a video appeal, and they’ve opened the voting to anyone involved with cooperatives in the U.S. The winning speaker will receive complimentary full registration.

Has your organization used online voting as marketing for membership or events?

A recent article on MeetingsNet discussed the Top 10 Mistakes of Association Web Sites, highlighting a quote from usability expert Amy Schade.

“Nobody’s intention is to have a poorly designed Web site,” she said. “The crux of the problem is that you and your colleagues use the same information and the same lingo, and everything on your site makes perfect sense to you. But your users have a totally different mindset. You must engage with your users and do user testing.”

The same is definitely true for your homepage and other pages that pertain to your annual elections and other voting events. We see a lot of well-intentioned sites that  try to give voters the information and inspiration they need to Vote Now! Here are the most common ways (adopted from MeetingsNet’s list) they are missing the mark.

1. Mistake 1: Believing that voters read what you write
   When voters need information about voting, they don’t want to wade through paragraph after paragraph about candidates, deadlines, instructions, etc. They want nice, easy-to-read instructions as well as intuitive links to more information.
2. Mistake 3: Ignoring the user’s top questions
   As MeetingsNet points out, “Organizations often assume everyone knows who they are and what they do.” The same is true when it comes to association elections. Many association staffers think members know why it’s important to vote in elections and the critical decisions that their elected officials can make. It’s important for leaders in your community to hammer home the point that the association is a democracy, and that members’ voices count.  Read the rest of this entry →

If you’re reading this, you’re spending too much time indoors this summer, says Coca-Cola. The company is taking its America Is Your Park competition to a new level with innovative options to vote for your favorite American park while you’re enjoying the summer sunshine.

Last year Coca-Cola ran an online voting contest to determine which U.S. parks were the most popular, awarding a $100,000 grant to Bear Head Lake State Park for the top title of America’s Favorite Park after they received 1.6 million online votes.

But this year Coca-Cola is taking the voting outdoors. Voters get one point for voting online, but if they use a smartphone or tablet to check in via Facebook at their park, they get 5 points. Five more points are awarded if voters upload pictures of themselves and their families at the park.

Associations could implement this strategy in their competitions as well. They could use social media check-in technology such as Facebook or foursquare to let voters at a conference choose the best new product from the expo hall or the best presentation in the education sessions.

What other ways can your organization implement more interactive online voting techniques?

When organizations consider online voting, they sometimes express concern that their members aren’t technologically savvy enough. But according to this fascinating history of email, the technology has been around since 1971.

This means that a 70-year-old voter was only 30 years old when the first email was sent. Queen Elizabeth II, who turned 85 in April,  sent her first electronic mail message in 1976. And this study by AARP shows that American’s born before 1955 make up 51% of the US population — and almost half of the people who use the Internet.

Are we perhaps underestimating the ability of a group of people who have been around the foundation of computer communication since they began their careers? We hear back from organizations all the time that they were surprised by the adoption of the technology by voters of all ages — including seniors. Perhaps the stereotype we have of seniors carries over into our decisions about new technology.

How does your organization view members over the age of 55? Are you worried about their computer ability?

The competitors in the Final Round of the 2011 March Mayhem were tense… who would take away the title of Best Resource for members of the Association of Corporate Counsel? Would it be the organization’s In-House Jobline that provided the best member benefit, or did ACC’s Annual Meeting rise to the top?

Echoing the NBA’s March Madness tournament playoffs, this spring ACC asked members to vote for their favorite resources and member benefits. Members could also fill out brackets that pitted 16 of the association’s member benefits against each other to see which resources garnered the most votes. Eight members with the best brackets won Aprizes such as gift certificates for ACC products, services and events — and the grand prize winner even received a basketball signed by the ACC staff.

All we can say is brilliant… simply brilliant. This case study is one of the best examples we’ve seen of ways to both engage members and showcase member benefits. ACC started the project in 2010, and members demanded its return in 2011. Because ACC released the results slowly over 10 days, they built up more and more excitement for the competition and engaged members over an extended period. In addition, the project engaged the staff at all levels and allowed the friendly competition to make everyone smile.

From an article about March Mayhem in Associations Now magazine:

ACC also created a video to promote the tournament, with staff playing the roles of various ACC resources and explaining their purpose. A cross-functional team worked on their own time to produce the video and make plans for the tournament. “When we did the videotaping, we kind of tried to do it all in one day, and the office was buzzing because people were really having a lot of fun with it. They couldn’t wait to get in and film their segment,” says [ACC Director of Membership Marketing Jim] Way. “And it just seemed like it was a big side benefit of the project that I didn’t anticipate, the actual enthusiasm and participation of our staff.”

It’s hard to top a voting March Mayhem tournament to determine the best association resources — but what other things have you heard about to engage members in an online voting event?