As the administrator, you can close your election at any time, or you can set up your elections to automatically close once all ballots have been cast. This feature is handy for real time voting, like at a board meeting where anyone with a Blackberry, iPhone or other PDA could register votes on the spot.

InviteRight takes your venue’s floor map and lets you designate the exact placement of your tables and seats. With just a few clicks, you can place your first table and then InviteRight can automatically align the remaining tables, saving you time and hassle. You can also designate specific xy coordinates to perfectly set the position of your tables, creating an accurate seating layout.

We are inviting all 2011 high school graduation coordinators and business managers to a networking event where they can learn and share graduation ideas and best practices with other Alberta high schools.

For more information, or to RSVP, visit our InviteRight graduation page.

We will be sharing successful ideas and stories, discussing top graduation issues, as well as ways to reduce costs on food, decorations, venues, etc.  What would you like to discuss at the seminar?  If you have specific topics you’d like to discuss, leave a comment and we will add your ideas to our agenda.

Sometimes you’ll want to allow your voters to submit their own candidate names, and ElectionBuddy makes it easy to tally and merge these write-ins.

For example, if someone adds a write-in candidate “Dave B” and another 3 people add the write-in candidate “David B,” you can combine both into 1 candidate for the purposes of tallying results.  This is done through a simple drag and drop process as shown below.

On the left, you can see the write-in names "David B" and "Dave B." If the candidate goes by "Dave B," you can drag the other spellings onto it to consolidate them, as shown on the right.

 By simply clicking the [+], you can expand the candidate name to see all the write-in variations of that name.  This keeps things organized when your voters may submit different spellings of the same candidate.

As promised, we’ve added a few new bells and whistles to ElectionBuddy that we think you’ll love, including:

Write-in Comments – You can now give voters the ability to provide write-in comments to referendum questions, enabling you to collect additional information and data in context of each vote.

Candidate Profiles — This new feature provides a clean and easy way for voters to see more details about each individual candidate.  Through a system of pop-up windows that seamlessly integrate themselves with the ballots, voters can make informed decisions with profiles that are immediately accessible.

If you haven’t already, you should go check out ElectionBuddy and take it for a spin — it’s free to try!

Here’s a quick peek at the new InviteRight setup pages that we’re working on.  The new design will make the creation and review of your invitations and templates so much easier and efficient — you’ll be able to see more of your creation on screen and the interface is more intuitive, allowing you to access options that you may not have noticed before.  You’ll know exactly where you are in the setup process at all times, and the new pages will help guide you through in a more streamlined way, so you can create your invitations faster and with less work.

Keep your eyes out for the new pages which will be coming soon…!

We wanted to share these “2 for 1″ coupons with you — just click the graphic below to enlarge it, then just print it or save it to your computer.  Have fun!

You may have noticed that ElectionBuddy.com has gotten a facelift.  The changes are subtle but we think they make a huge difference in readability and useability of the site.  I won’t go down the full list of design changes we made but you should go check it out for yourself and see how easy it is to navigate through.  Leave us some feedback and let us know what you think.

We’re pleased to announce a new ElectionBuddy pricing category!  We still offer free elections for up to 20 voters, but now you can hold small elections that can support as many as 100 voters for just $9.  In addition, you also get email support, SSL encryption for voters and you can reuse email lists from past elections.  Not bad for just $9!  And that still includes all the powerful functionality of the new ElectionBuddy 3.0 – if you haven’t heard about all the new features, check out the blog post.

One of the things we’ve improved in InviteRight is the Reminders functionality.  We know that your guests are busy too and can sometimes forget to submit payments, fill in names of their companions, or any other number of details that may require a friendly little reminder from you as the organizer.

InviteRight makes it easy for you to see at a glance who still needs to submit some details, and with just a few clicks you can send all those guests a friendly reminder.  We’ve improved the system so that now you can track all the reminders you’ve sent, and to whom — you can click on individual guests to see a summary of all the reminders they’ve been sent.

Hey we know it’s hard to keep track of things sometimes!  But this little feature should make your life that much easier, and help your event stay on track.