Creating an Election

This guide provides step-by-step instructions and examples to create a new election form for your organization on the Involvement Network. This guide covers everything from configuring basic election details and instructions to building custom ballots with various question types.

ELS
21 steps
2 minutes

Uga

Navigate to the Involvement Network at <https://uga.campuslabs.com/engage/>. Log in using your UGA MyID and password.

Open the main menu on the left hand side of the screen by clicking the icon in the upper left hand corner.

Find the organization that you would like to update the primary contact for, located under the "My Organizations" section of the menu. Click on the gear icon to open your organization's toolbox.

From the toolbox, select "Elections"

To create a brand new election, select the blue “CREATE ELECTION” button at the top, right of the page.

This will take you to create the election form. Be sure to update all of the required fields including: - **Name** of the election - **Additional Instructions** for the election - Enable the election to be **Active** - **Start Date and Time** for when the election will be active - **End Date and Time** for when the election will be active - who is able to vote in the election - If only your members should vote in this election, you should check the box that states "Only Allow Users Listed on the Roster of this Organization to Vote. This will limit voting to your organization's members, provided that your roster is up to date. Make sure to press "SAVE" once you are finished.

You will then be redirected to a page that shows you your election properties, ballots, results, and publishing options. To create a ballot, select "CREATE BALLOT"

Create a **Name** for the ballot, decide your **Access Restrictions**, and click "SAVE"

When you are ready to add to your ballot, please review the list of question types as they all serve their own unique purpose. See below for a complete explanation of the question type & function: - **Check Box List:** Multiple choice question that allows users to choose more than one option. - **Radio Button List:** Multiple choice question that only allows users to select one option. - **Text Field:** Open text response. Alter the number of rows to provide the user a larger space to write in for longer answers. You can also use the Text Field question to utilize validation, ensuring a specific format is entered. - **Instructions:** This is your method of providing additional instructions or information to the user. Instructions do not require any action on the part of the user - **Ranking:** Provide the user multiple answer choices for them to rank. You can also determine the maximum number of items they need to rank. Note: Any time you add a question to your ballot or change a setting, these changes will save in real time.

Let's add a **Radio Button List** for users to cast their vote for President. This will create a multiple choice question that only allows users to select one option.

In the "Question Text" box, enter your text information. This example states: "Please cast your vote for President." In the "Answer Text" box, enter the name(s) of the individuals running for the president position. This example lists "Hairy Dawg", "Spike", and "UGA" as the three candidates running for the position of president. Click "OK" to create your Radio Button Question.

After clicking "OK", the Radio Button List question will be created.

If you click the question, you can edit the question properties by clicking the box with a pen icon.

In the Question Text **Properties**, you can enable the question to be a "Required" question and/or "Shuffle Answers"

You can also edit the properties for the "Answers"

For each answer, you can add features such as "Include Tooltip" or "Include Additional Text"

Tip: Using “Tooltip” vs. “Include Additional Text” in Forms When building questions, both Include Tooltip and Include Additional Text provide extra guidance, but they appear differently for users. Include Additional Text creates a blue “i” icon that users click to view more information. For example, a user can click the Additional Text icon to view candidate campaign summaries, including their platforms and key priorities. Tooltip provides brief hover text. This can be used similarly to the additional text feature, but is better suited for short text or highlights. Important: Information in both fields is not visible unless the user interacts with it, so don’t rely on them for critical instructions.

In this example, the Hairy Dawg answer has "Include Tooltip." The UGA answer has "Include Additional Text", which creates a blue "i" icon.

You can create several questions on one page. To create another question, select a question from the question list.

You can also create multiple pages in your election. To create another page, click "PAGE LIST"

After clicking "PAGE LIST", you will be redirected. Here, you can click the blue PAGE button to create more pages.

Continue to build our your election form to best fit the needs of your organization.

Once your election is finished, you can look at the final results by going to the "RESULTS" tab and seeing the count and percentage for each candidate. You also can export these votes into an excel sheet.