The following scenario happens too frequently. An organization creates an account at ElectionsOnline; the point of contact for that account leaves; that person’s replacement comes on board and is assigned the responsibility of managing an election and creates a new account instead of using that organization’s existing account. The system does not permit two accounts with the same organization name, so there is that safeguard in place to discourage this from happening, but it’s possible to modify the name of an organization by just one character (perhaps by using an abbreviation) to create what is essentially a duplicate account. There are several reasons why this careless approach is bad for an organization, such as:
- ElectionsOnline archives your election results. These results are accessible in your account, but when a client creates duplicate accounts, they have no central place to retrieve results from previous elections.
- Elections may be copied from previous elections. This can be a huge time saver especially for more complex ballot configurations, but previous elections are obviously not shared across duplicate accounts.
- ElectionsOnline offers some very generous ways to save. The repeat usage and group account discounts are only available to a single account. And should a client have a multi-year discount agreement in place, that agreement would be attached to only a single account.
- It’s not possible for two accounts to share the same organization name. This means that in order to create duplicate accounts, the organization name has to somehow be altered. There are only so many modifications that can be made to an organization’s name before it’s no longer recognizable, so it’s much easier to maintain a single account with the true character-for-character name of the organization.
ElectionsOnline helps simplify the transfer of an account from one individual to another by providing Account transfer documentation. Simply login to your account; click the My Info tab on the welcome screen; then click the Account transfer documentation link. The document provides information on where the new point of contact may go to login along with the login data. It is everything a new account owner needs, so by all means take advantage of it.
