Ahead of your upcoming elections, here are some of our tips to help you prepare for this exciting time of year, making the setup and running of your election through your MSL System as easy as possible!

25/02/2022 - Top tips are now updated to include information about our brand new publishing your election results functionality.

1) Reduce the number of clicks for your members before voting.

If your website has a Single Sign-On (SSO) login, create a quicklink SSO URL you can use in your social media posts, email communication and website links to take your members straight through your website log in to the election ballot page. There’s guidance explaining how to create this URL on our Creating a ballot page quicklink support page.

2) Use the Copy function to save yourself loads of time re-creating your Officer election.

Create a new election in seconds using our Copy election tool. You can duplicate a previous election using the Copy function in Elections Admin. This handy tool copies the election details and posts but does not copy any candidate or voting information.

3) Check and update the requirements for each post in your election straight from Elections Admin.

Once you’ve created your election and added your posts, you can now check and change the requirements set against each post directly in Elections Admin, making the setup of your election, and troubleshooting voting issues during your election even easier.

4) Set up real-time voting stats to create a visual display of how well your members are engaging with your elections.

Set up and display real-time voting stats on your website, including vote and voter counters, and absolute or percentage turnout for your elections based on your University data and Student Group memberships. If real-time voting stats have been set up before, double-check you have linked any new data values and/or new Student Groups to items before voting opens. Our Real-time voting stats - Organisations and Data support page shows you how. 

5) Familiarise yourself with our new web-based election counting screens.

We’ve moved all of the functionality you used in our old Windows election count application (including the vote record and the advanced counting options) to our new web-based election counting screens. Avoid any last-minute worries about launching the Windows election count application and check out the web-based count ahead of your upcoming election counts.

6) Add your winners straight into their role from the count.

You might want to add your elected candidates into their roles for reporting purposes, to display their information on your website so your members know who to contact for help (e.g. their course representatives), or to permit them to edit their organisation's admin tools (e.g. your Student Group committee members). Our Adding elected candidates to post support page shows you how to add them to their role straight from the election count.

7) Check out our advice about Safeguarding your elections.

For tips about how to make sure your election is as secure as possible, take a look at our Safeguarding your elections support page including guidance about setting up voting notifications.

8) Watch back on our Running Successful Elections training sessions.

Ahead of your officer elections, our popular Elections training came around again, and we're pleased to invite you to watch back on our week of free briefings, each session was recorded and can be found here on our event page.

New release... Displaying your winning candidates on your website.

Displaying your winning candidates is quick and easy with our brand new development. Once your election polling has ended, and the counts completed and approved, the winners of each post can be published on the website with the results displayed via the elections list widget. For more information, check out our Publish election results support page.

You might also be interested in...

Our text messaging service if you'd like to send an SMS to your non-voters reminding them to cast a vote. Include a voting quicklink in your text message content to get your members to the ballot page in as few steps as possible.

Thank you

We hope you've found some of these tips useful - please share your own tips with us or get in touch by emailing support@ukmsl.com for help using any of these features.

If there is a particular theme or topic you'd like us to cover, please send us your suggestions and we'll bear them in mind when planning our next post.