Although recent studies show many organizations have moved to online voting, some groups still rely on the US Postal Service to deliver paper ballots to voters. The postal service is looking at going into default by the end of September and expects to lose $8 billion or more this year.

The postal service is proposing major budget cuts and cost savings with several steps that may affect the delivery of paper ballots to voters:

• Eliminating 220,000 full-time jobs, in addition to the 110,000 jobs they’ve already cut in the last four years, plus 7,500 administrative jobs that are ending soon.
• Shutting down 300 processing centers by 2015.
• Closing up to 3,700 postal offices.

In addition, a new study commissioned by the inspector general revealed that the USPS could save about $1.5 billion a year if it gave itself an extra day to deliver first-class and Priority Mail, which generally arrive in 2-3 days. Other proposals include delivering mail 5 days a week or less instead of 6.

These changes raise questions for organizations that use paper ballots, such as:

• Will your organization have to send out paper ballots earlier to ensure delivery in a certain voting window? Sending out paper ballots is already a time-intensive process — when your window of mail delivery lengthens or changes, are you prepared to organize the process earlier?
• Do your voters live in areas that may lose a local post office, thus making the ballot return more of a chore? Voter turnout is one of the biggest challenges organizations face, and anything that decreases the likelihood of a voter returning a ballot should be a concern.

How is your organization conducting voting events in the age of technology? Will the changes by the USPS affect your voters?

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?

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?

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 →

Watch Votenet’s latest webinar, “Top Ten Considerations for Bringing Your Elections Online,” held in conjunction with the Avectra Academy, or download the PowerPoint here.

The Votenet team regularly creates white papers, benchmark studies and tip sheets to help you improve voter turnout and understand the issues around voting events, both online and traditional. Click here to view the Votenet resource library, and sign up to receive emails on upcoming webinars and new resources.

Rich Finstein is the president of CommPartners, an ASAE-Endorsed Business Solutions Provider for webinar and online meeting solutions for associations. CommPartners recently  published a white paper and presented a session at the 2010 ASAE Annual Conference regarding the methodology used by the American Nurses Association (ANA) to move several of their formal governance meetings to a virtual format. We asked him to contribute his experiences about the use of technology for governance in the association industry.

ANA was experiencing significant budget shortfalls last year and were pressed into finding ways to reduce costs. They typically would pay for their board to come to Washington and cover accommodations and meals. Moving to a virtual format had the potential to save them over a hundred thousand dollars for two meetings held in the fall of last year. The economics were promising, however serious questions had to be answered:

1. Could they have formal deliberations that included Roberts Rules of Order?
2. Could they handle emotionally charged issues in virtual format? How would participants react when they were not face to face?
3. What would be the impact on morale of the board? Would they welcome this change?
4. What resources were needed to manage this process?

Read the rest of this entry →

Online voting systems and services are widely used by many national and international associations for their board of director’s elections.  Lately, we find more and more component groups looking toward online voting systems and services.

As defined on the ASAE website: “Components are an affiliated or independent society, chapter, branch, special-interest group, or division of an international, national, state, regional, or local organization. Component relations professionals make services and benefits come alive for association members through their affiliates.”  These groups could range in size from two members to thousands of members.

The dynamic between national and component organizations varies widely from deep involvement, and shared bylaws, to completely autonomous organizations, both legally and culturally.

Would a component group need to find their own online election vendor directly, or might they be able to rely on their national organization to supply the system and services?  Or would the national organization make a recommendation to the component group about their preferred vendor, and possibly also have a discount set-up? Read the rest of this entry →