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?

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?

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?

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?

How do you make sure your voters remember to cast their votes?

The other day we passed a housing development with these lawn signs, urging residents to mail their Satisfaction Surveys in by the deadline. This type of in-your-face reminder helps keep a voting event top of mind for your constituents, especially if your voting is happening in one day at one location, such as at a conference or at a school.

When it comes to online voting, your organization can combine both electronic reminders with other notifications to make sure your voters don’t miss their deadlines.

Next time you have an online voting event, try some of these reminder methods:

1. Send targeted emails to your voters to remind them to vote. The emails should be personalized with each voter’s login information to make voting simple.
2. Include reminders in all outgoing email blasts from your organization, such as newsletters, updates and more.
3. Have staff members include a reminder in their email signatures.
4. Send out reminder postcards that will arrive a couple of days before the voting deadline.
5. Place ads or notices in your organization’s publications (hard copy and/or electronic), as well as other key industry publications.
6. If your voters all work or live in the same community, place yard signs or posters in the area.
7. Encourage candidates and other interested parties to send out reminder notes to their databases as well.
8. Post reminders on your organization’s social networks, such as your LinkedIn group, Facebook page or Twitter feed.
9. Try bulk text messaging.

What other reminders have you used to get the word out? What has been the most effective?

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. Continue reading “Bring Life to Your Elections with Candidate Videos” »

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. Continue reading “What the University of Michigan Fight Song Teaches Us about Security” »