Scheduling an Initial Email Blast

In order for your electors to receive information and voting credentials, you must Schedule an Email Blast. View your election and navigate to the Email Blast section.

You have three choices when choosing the recipients of your Email Blasts:

• You may send an Email Blast to All Electors with a valid email address, often useful for sending out your first invitation and instructions.
• Or you may send an Email Blast to Electors that have not yet voted, often useful for sending out reminders to increase voter turnout.
• Or you may send an Email Blast to Specific Electors, often useful for resending invitations or reminders to individual electors with bounced email addresses that have been corrected, in addition to countless other possible reasons.

Once you have decided on the recipients of your email blast, specify who the message is From. Then you may specify the Subject and format the Body of the email message.

The Voting System provides you with a standard content template, but the Body of the email is a free form text field so you can add, remove, and format content as you would like.

In the Body, items in {{double brackets}} indicate specific elector data fields, which will be unique to each recipient, and the system will automatically fill in the appropriate {{bracketed}} information when the emails are sent out to electors:

• Use {{name}} to address your electors (Elector ID is used if Name is unavailable).
• Use {{elector_id}} and {{password}} to supply electors with their voting credentials.
• Use {{voting_website_link}} to provide electors with the link to your voting website's login page.
• Use {{direct_vote_link}} to allow electors to bypass logging in manually by allowing them to click on a unique securely encoded hyperlink in the message.

Once satisfied with the Body of your message, click on the Preview & Schedule button.

This final preview helps ensure that your {{placeholders in brackets}} are properly formatted and functioning correctly with dummy fictitious elector data from a "John Doe."

Review the preview and once satisfied in the Schedule section you can now schedule an email blast to be sent to your electors at the election's start, inviting them to vote in your election, and supplying them with their unique voting credentials and instructions. Alternatively, you can opt to send an email blast later at a specific date and time of your choosing. Click the Submit button when you are ready to confirm and schedule.

After scheduling your email blast, a yellow Finalization Pending notice will appear at the top of the page, and the Email Blast History section will be updated with your new email blast.