Student Organization mySNC Help Guide
Running an Election
Step 1: Create the ballot.
In your group, click on Surveys & Forms in the left hand column under Dashboard. Click the + Create button at the top of the page and select election. You'll need to name your page and the document. There’s a box where you can type a description of the ballot. Then, click the Add Question button.
Select Question Type - Election.
Step 2: Create Question for each officer position.
In the Question box, you can put which position you'll be voting for and you'll see it gives you a field to choose Candidate 1. Start typing a name and it will let you select someone to make a candidate. You can enter a description and if you want each candidate to make a video, there's a place to paste it. Or, you can attach other files. You could have each candidate submit a word document with information about themselves or a statement about why others should vote for them.
You can continue to add candidates for this role. You can also check the box to select the option to add a No Vote option. Continue to add candidates until you’ve listed everyone.
After that, you can choose whether or not the question is mandatory. You can also choose that only officers can see a question and whether it should be hidden from others. The button titled, “Access Rights” gives you the ability to limit voters to your group only.
You can include other instructions or attach a file to the question. You might use this if you want to have one document that has a paragraph about each person running for that position.
Step 3: Set permissions for who can vote.
This is the box that pops up when you click “Access Rights.” You’ll notice there is a difference between members and contacts. You can control how you want to categorize people. If someone just comes to a couple of events during the semester, they may not want to be a member but want to know about your events. You can have them be a contact instead of a member. You may or may not want those folks to vote in your election.
You can randomize candidates if you're concerned that members will just pick the first name on the list.
Once you have everything set up for that role in the election, click Save Changes. You’ll go to the next screen where you can add a question. You’ll do all the same things for the next elected role.
Step 4: Add all the settings that format your election ballot.
Under settings (at the top of the page), you can customize the confirmation message, etc. If you click on Open/Close/Cap under Settings, you can set the open and close time for your election. That way it’s automated and you don’t have to remember the exact time to close the election. If you want to keep track of votes as they come in, you can select “Notifications” under settings and tell it which officer to notify. When you’re done, click save and exit the settings box.
You can preview the ballot by clicking the preview button at the top.
Step 5: Send out the ballot.
When you're done creating the ballot, save it and click where it says to go back to the list of surveys & forms. From there, click on the 3 dots at the end of the line where your ballot exists. Select invite and you'll be able to compose an email that will go out to the people you select. They can then vote. You can see there are also options to require your members to sign-in, allow them to only submit a single time and disable editing of the form. Other officers can edit the form in mySNC, so you may want to select that for an election.
Once people begin to vote, you can access the ballot by clicking on it. You can see from the menu of documents that you have submissions.