Fresh Features, Functionality, and Framework

Feature — Reporting Groups

ElectionBuddy has recently released a new feature called “Reporting Groups”! I think the reporting groups is the most exciting of our new releases since it has been a huge labour of love from our entire team. This is a big feature and we have considered and crafted every nook and cranny of it. Many administrators have been waiting for this and we are so excited for you to see it! The feature allows you to get a breakdown of the results of your election by various demographics within your voter population. Some examples of what you can use reporting groups for might be location, age, gender, etc.. For example, if you are a national-level union, you could set up reporting groups to get results by State and Local.

For each election, you can include up to three reporting groups. The breakdown of these reporting groups appears in the “Grouped Results” report. With these grouped results you can get a better idea of how members vote in each subgroup.

For more information on our reporting groups, check out our help article!

Functionality — Location

We recently released some new functionality that allows you to select the location of your organization! Once your organization’s location is inputted, ElectionBuddy automatically selects the time zone that is related to your organization for your election. For example, if your organization is located in New York, NY, USA, ElectionBuddy will automatically select the Eastern time zone option.

By automatically pulling the time zone for your location we hope to give you one less thing to worry about when setting up your election.

For more information on how to update or add your organization’s location, please check out our help article!

Functionality — Election Title

This update is tiny but we hope it has a major impact on how you manage your election setup! As see above, we are now including the title of your election on every page of the setup process. For our administrators who work on numerous elections at the same time, this functionality will hopefully help you better manage your ballots since you can consistently see the title of your election while you work on it. This means you will not have to head back to the “Details” page to see what election you are currently working on.

Functionality — Help

Our “Help” functionality has a makeover! With the new functionality (thanks HelpScout!) our Customer Success team is provided with more nuanced information. For example, we can see if a lot of administrators are encountering the same issue on the same page. This means we can go in and make small changes that will hopefully have a big impact on your setup experience!

In the future, we will make the setup process even smoother for you! “How?” you might ask? Currently the “Learn more” links open up in a new tab in your web browser but soon, we will be implementing a change that will open the help article in a sidebar alongside your election setup, meaning that you can get help right in ElectionBuddy when you need it most.

Functionality — Translations

Last summer, ElectionBuddy started offering French and Portuguese on the ballot as alternative language options for voters when voting. Now, we have added translations for Italian and Croatian to ElectionBuddy. These translations aim to help you give your voters a better experience no matter where they are located.

Here is a guide to running your election in a language other than English. We hope with our translations we make ElectionBuddy more accessible to voters everywhere.

ElectionBuddy has taken a collaborative approach to adding language translations to the ballot by getting help from our community, so please feel free to reach out to us if you are interested in adding a language translation that we currently do not offer.

Framework — Ruby on Rails 6.0

In order to keep ElectionBuddy in tip-top shape for our administrators, we also need to make some changes to our infrastructure. Recently our development team has upgraded our Ruby on Rails 5.2 to Ruby on Rails 6.0!

By updating to the newer version we benefit from performance improvements as well as any new features Ruby might have released. This means our developers can keep effectively working on cool things for you, our administrators!

If you speak Ruby, you can check out the release notes for Ruby 6.0 here.

Soon…

On top of the above changes, we are currently working on making the onsite meeting voting experience for administrators and voters. You may have already noticed th start of the changes we are making on the “Details” page with the new “Remote or Onsite Voting” setting. We will be sure to update you on our onsite voting functionality once it has been released!

It’s been a busy time here at ElectionBuddy and all these changes couldn’t happen if it weren’t for YOU, our customers! Please feel free to email us with any suggestions or questions you might have. You can contact us here!