Strong member engagement = higher voter participation. Leveraging the communities your organization has developed on LinkedIn, Facebook, or elsewhere, can be a great way to increase awareness of, and participation in, your next election. But Higher Logic, with its integration with ElectionsOnline, can be an especially useful tool to drive increased voter participation.
An Example
For this example, we’ll assume Lisa is a highly influential member of the Society of Modern Voters (SMV) and that SMV’s annual board of directors election has just begun.
- Lisa visits the SMV website and logs in to vote because in this scenario the ElectionsOnline ballot is fully integrated with the SMV website (as opposed to being hosted entirely at the ElectionsOnline website).
- She casts her ballot and is recorded as having voted in SMV’s Association Management System (AMS).
- Magic happens behind the scenes and Lisa’s voting activity is copied from the AMS to Higher Logic.
- Lisa moves to the online community section of the SMV website hosted by Higher Logic. She contributes to a community conversation, and thanks to the magic that occurred in step three, an I Voted badge displays alongside her contribution. That badge also displays in the Higher Logic member directory and on Lisa’s profile page.
- Because Lisa is a well-respected, influential member of SMV, other members are reminded of the election and influenced to vote upon seeing the I Voted badge associated with Lisa. To make it especially simple to drive traffic to the online ballot, the badge is clickable and points to the ballot landing page. By doing this, SMV is applying the concept of social proof to drive increased voter participation.
The Tools Required
This is not dependent on any particular AMS. Anything able to record voting activity and periodically push data to Higher Logic works. That said, at the time of this writing, ElectionsOnline has productized integrations for:
- iMIS
- netFORUM
and is also a partner with Community Brands and able to integrate with any of the Community Brands products including:
- Aptify
- Nimble AMS
- Your Membership.
Should your organization use an AMS not already integrated with ElectionsOnline, that’s not a show-stopper. ElectionsOnline’s API means any voter database and/or content management system could consume the ballot pages into an external system and record voting activity which is then pushed to Higher Logic.
Conclusion
Every client I’ve ever worked with was interested in increasing voter participation, but that doesn’t happen by simply wishing for it, or by hammering an electorate with additional email reminders—an approach which can actually have an adverse effect. Instead, rely on peer-to-peer influence to drive that increase, and Higher Logic is perfectly well-suited to help with that.
