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.

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.

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.

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…!

I have been spending the last few days working on minor tweaks and updates to our blog and other areas of the InviteRight software. But more importantly I have been working on getting our new form design ready to be rolled out. Well luckily the day of being able to see our marvelous new forms on your very own events has come one step closer.

As you may have noticed on your events, the response categories look a little different than usual. Think of this as a sneak preview of the coming changes to the rest of the form. The code monkeys are hard at work behind the scenes to ensure the rest of the forms are bug free. So I hope you’re looking forward to the stylish new registration form design as much as we are.