Elections: Survey Monkey & Random Order & Candidate Statements

Survey Monkey

This has been a good program to use for elections.

The ballots are sent to the membership list (that is downloaded from vertical response and the latest bounce list and then uploaded to survey monkey), in the settings click so the responses are not tied to an email address.  Then reminders can be sent only to the people who have not voted (or to the people who have voted, or to all I think too).  CUE has a much larger membership than SDCUE but I think I heard they only had 200 votes last election - we had over 100 for our 2011 and our 2013 elections.  The words for the emails must have been successful to get that kind of turn out!  

SDCUE has an free account set up and could have paid the fee for a month to be able to send emails out to all members, but since my husband's personal account had been used and I could see the older email words I just used that account.

There are other systems to use that cost more, and on investigation didn’t seem to have more features.  CUE has been looking in to different programs to use for elections.

At the end of the election the officers received all the vote totals, only the top 11 (of 13 names) were reported to the membership.

Order of Names on the Ballot

Previously we listed names in alphabetical order on our ballots. This time we put the list in random order. To get the random order we put the names in google spreadsheet, then in a different column we put this formula by each name: =INT(1000*RAND()) When you click refresh then the numbers in front of the names change. We established the order with a committee of two by saying we would refresh three times then that would be the order of the names on the ballot. One person created another spreadsheet and typed in the numbers then we sorted to see the order for the candidate statements and the names on the ballot.

Candidate Statements

Previously candidates were just asked to submit statements and what ever they returned was posted on the candidate statement page. CUE limits statements to 250 words. The statements should be long enough that members actually can get an overview of who the people are. We asked candidates to submit photos too. The photos were then resized so they were all the same - could request a particular size to save time!

June Dodge
Former Affiliate Board Member

Vertical Response

Vertical Response is a mail list program that offers non-profits up to 10,000 email to be sent out at no cost.  It's pretty simple to sign up - and now CUE is using this program to update the membership database, saving affiliates the task of uploading the data themselves.

The affiliate should have one person in charge of the account.

Before an email is sent out a draft should be sent around to be sure information is correct and to see if any notice is missing.

Within the program one can override the default and put perhaps a better return address - the one of the person sending the email is best.

Also, I'm finding now that I am stepping out of the this role, that I should have consistently taken time to fill out the description of each list - that would have been more helpful to others when they are deciding to send targeted emails.

It's good for there to be an initial or name in the email so people know who to direct questions to, etc.  In the backend the initials of the person can be put in the title too.

Once an email bounces then it is not possible to upload via another list upload, so the membership chair needs to monitor the new lists and take time to unbounce people so the receive emails.  It takes time though, but that should be something done.

We noticed an issue with the uploaded lists and have found at least one person that should have been on the membership lists for our affiliate but they were not.  CUE has been written so they are aware of this issue.