In InviteRight, it’s really easy to get fast answers to tough questions by creating your own reports through views.  When you create an event and start accepting responses, 2 views are automatically created for you:

1) All Responses (showing your entire list of guests and all their contact or professional details), and
2) All Payments (which lists the status of all transactions per guest).

Switching between these 2 main views is easy, giving you an instant update on your entire guest list.   Within these 2 main views, you can instantly edit records, send reminders to guests who haven’t paid yet, or even refund guests when necessary.  You can also export these views as a spreadsheet or text file.

InviteRight also makes it easy for you to generate your own custom views .  For example, say you wanted to provide your venue with a list of guests and their special meal requests.  You can define only those details and InviteRight will instantly create a view that you can download as a spreadsheet and email to your caterer.

 InviteRight also summarizes information automatically for you  For example, the Fee Summary gives a simple overview of all payments which you can sort by payment method:

And if you want to see the status of payments, you can access the Payment Log to view transaction details for payments:

No matter how many guests you have, InviteRight makes it easy to report and manage the guest list.  This means you spend less time on administration and more time on planning the fun parts of your event.

Based on feedback from our user community, it was very common for returning officers to accidentally misspell an email address when creating the eligible voter list.

To help with this, we improved ElectionBuddy error checking to make sure the email address is of valid form (eg. example@example.example).  We also gave returning officers the ability to edit email addresses after the election has been started. This is great when you find that one of your voters lets you know they’ve changed their email address, but you’ve already sent the ballot.  Changes will tracked to ensure the integrity of the election.

The InviteRight interactive floor map allows you to take the map you receive from your hotel or conference centre and turns it into a visual map that allows your guests to pick their tables and seats when they register, similar to choosing your seat when buying an airline ticket online.  Or if you like, you can assign guest seating yourself, or allow certain guests to pick their own tables and assign others yourself, you choose!

 In the latest InviteRight version  placing tables within the map is a snap; place the first couple of tables (shown below in green) and  then duplicate those tables into an entire row or column (as shown in the lefthand menu):

Once that row or column of tables has been created, you can now duplicate that entire row and continue to do so until all your tables have been placed, dragging your new tables into position or using the arrow pad to “nudge” them exactly to where you want.

This new system of selecting multiple tables to edit or duplicate has made setup really fast and easy.  The more tables you have for your event, the more you’ll love this feature.

To make things easier for our users, ElectionBuddy has updated its FAQ pages to help you find answers to your questions faster and easier.  We’ve also created a brand new ElectionBuddy Forum where you and other users can share ideas, best practices and learn from each other about how to use ElectionBuddy more effectively.

On Friday, Nov. 26, our offices will be closed for the day as we move to a new location in downtown Edmonton, not too far from where we are now.  As we will be in transition, we will have limited access to email and phones but will be checking messages periodically — if you require assistance, leave us a message and we will get back to you as soon as possible.  We appreciate your patience during our office move and look forward to providing you even better service from our brand new quarters.

Calling all ElectionBuddy users!  We are hoping to get your thoughts about how you have used ElectionBuddy.com, what you like about ElectionBuddy and how we can make it better.

We have had a bunch of new elections and users in the past year – schools, home owners associations, churches, professionals, universities, colleges…  the list grows!  We strive to keep improving ElectionBuddy for you, so your suggestions are important to us.

Please email us or add your comments here — we appreciate all your feedback!

You can re-use a previous list of voters for a new election by simply pulling that email list from the old election and importing it into your new one.  This makes setting up new elections a snap when you typically poll the same group of people each time.  You can even integrate it with other contact management systems like HighRise.

This feature is useful for board meetings when you have a number of important issues that need to be voted on, and there is sensitivity towards who votes for what.  You can conduct a secret ballot which can be easily set up, allowing members to vote on their iPhones or Blackberries.  You can continue to use ElectionBuddy for these small elections free of charge as long as you have less than 20 board members.

When it's time to enter in the email addresses of your voters, simply click "get addresses from another election"...

... and you can choose one of your previous elections to import email addresses from.

We’re excited to announce the latest update to ElectionBuddy that just became available this week.  It includes some cool new features like raw results and abstain options which we’ll be talking more about in the near future, including an interesting story behind the creation of the abstain option which was the result of some feedback from one of our overseas users.

Because EventIQ is mostly known for our leading products like InviteRight and ElectionBuddy, it’s easy to forget that we provide additional services like nametags and lanyards.  Like this one we did for Reynolds, Mirth, Richards & Farmer LLP — it’s a subtle but nice extra touch to see every one of your conference or trade show attendees wearing lanyards with your branding.

InviteRight is fast becoming the online ticketing system of choice for Alberta high school graduations.  Those schools that used it last year to sell their graduation tickets all praised InviteRight for saving them lots of time and accounting headaches.  We were eager to learn from the schools how we can help make their next graduation even smoother for them, but we also knew they could learn a lot from each other.

Earlier this week, we hosted a seminar for 25 graduation coordinators, business managers and assistant principals representing 9 different Alberta high schools.  The goal was to provide them with a networking forum where they could share best practices and ideas about how to pull off a successful graduation.

The teachers who attended were able to share tips on everything from fundraising to reducing costs to table seating.  Each school had their own system of organizing grad, and it was great to see so much discussion about what worked and what didn’t.  I sent a feedback survey out afterwards and I was glad to hear that the teachers learned a lot from each other.

Taking a break for a delicious lunch.

We’re planning on holding another graduation best practices seminar on December 2 in Calgary for all the Calgary and surrounding area high schools and I’m very excited to see the results of that one as well.  If you’re a high school teacher or administrator involved in your school’s graduation, you can check out our graduation page for helpful links to a variety of graduation resources, as well as an invitation to our Calgary seminar.