Elections Administration Committee: Operations Co-Chair

Hi,

My name is Chloe Stevens and I was the EAC Vice Chair for the 2017-2018 school year. This job is more of a partnership with the EAC Chair, with you doing more of the internal focused work while the Chair does more external work. Most of your focus is on the interns, the committee, and social media/marketing. I tried to be as comprehensive as possible with my transition documents, but I never had any so there might be something missing since I didn’t have a model to work from, so feel free to reach out and ask me questions after reading through all of my long paragraphs. Congratulations on getting the job, I’m sure you will be a great Vice-Chair! I guess a few words of advice that I would have for you are to be open to talking through your ideas with the Chair, the Committee, and other ASUW employees around you. Asking for suggestions and improving upon your ideas will help you be successful in this job (especially since marketing means you need to appeal to a diverse group of students, so getting other perspectives really helps). Personally, I loved being the Vice Chair and I found this job to be super fun and rewarding, and I hope you do as well! I hope your ASUW Elections runs smoothly, enjoy the year!

—

Chloe Stevens

NetID/Google

NetID: asuweac

email: asuweac@uw.edu

password: $Democracy2018$

(feel free to change the password to something easier for you to remember, here’s the link for that page: https://uwnetid.washington.edu/manage/?password)

Slack

asuwseattle.slack.com

email: asuweac@uw.edu

password: $Democracy2018$

Website

www.vote.asuw.org

Website url: https://vote.asuw.org/wp-admin/index.php

username: EAC Chair’s UW NetID

password: EAC Chair’s UW NetID password

HUB Room reservations

website: hubres@uw.edu

username: asuwvote

password: elect17

Facebook

Have Chair add you as an ADMIN

Instagram

username: asuwelections

password: asuweac

Twitter

username: @asuwvote

password: asuwelections2014

SAO Printer code: 1323

RSO office print code and equipment rental password: asuwvote-eac

Budget number: 16-9414

Office desktop: asuwRulz1234!

Predecessor (feel free to reach out with any questions!)

Chloe Stevens

phone: (409) 489-6555

email: 13chlobo13@gmail.com

also feel free to message me on Facebook

Starting at the beginning of the year

• Meet with Chair (30min-1hr)
• Meet with Board of Director Liaison – Casey Duff (30min-1hr)
• Meet with SAO Advisors – Coop and Emily (30min-1hr)

Starting at various times

• Meet with interns (we did two different versions: fall/winter we had one large meeting with all interns for 1 hour, spring we had individual meetings with each intern for 30 minutes each)
• Meet with general committee (once a week for an hour)

Fall Quarter

• Hire Interns (first half of quarter)
• Discuss and pick a theme for elections (discuss with interns) – make sure it’s a theme that gives you a catchy slogan to put on posters that relates to/promotes elections
• Recruit committee members (second half of quarter)
• Reserve weekly meeting space for committee at hubres as soon as you have a time set to meet
• Help Chair edit the EPP

Winter Quarter

• Reserve weekly meeting space for committee at hubres as soon as you have a time set to meet
• Hold info sessions about elections
• Have programming intern contact as many businesses for donations as possible
• Have kick off fair planned, rent or buy the materials you need
  • reach out to HFS to get snow cone and cotton candy machines if you want those
• Present to RSOs/student groups about elections
• Reach out to teachers to ask about making announcements in their class about elections

Spring Quarter

• Reserve weekly meeting space for committee at hubres as soon as you have a time set to meet
• Recruit volunteers for election day tabling (we opened the app on the first day of spring quarter)
• Have Voter’s Guide assembled asap and printed a week before elections
• Have free goodies to give away at voting tables

Below are some of the contacts I used this year, and the resources we used for various things.

KIND Bars

Ryan Fallgren (he’s the guy who gave me the email of the new KIND Bar rep, since they hire new ones each year)

email: rfallgren@kindsnacks.com

Area 01

Drew Zimmerman

email: wdzimm@uw.edu

On-Campus Classroom Reservations

email: times@uw.edu

Resources

• Stickermule (for stickers to pass out at tables)
• Imagesource (for t-shirts)
• Abby Party Rentals (for tables and chairs at voting booths

The Elections Policies and Procedures document is the governing document for the ASUW Elections. Every year it undergoes revisions by the EAC, with the process beginning in Fall Quarter and the goal being to get the amendments approved by the beginning of Winter Quarter. While it is not solely your job, this past year I helped the Chair revise the document. It is a lot of work, and it is a good idea to have multiple people bouncing ideas for changes and language off of each other. This past year it was me, the Chair, and the Director of Internal Policy working on the EPP, but I would recommend expanding the process to include the committee (maybe this would look like assigning each person a section of the EPP to go over and make suggestions for edits, whether they be bigger changes or grammatical edits). I feel that including the committee would be beneficial because it can save you and the Chair some time, and it also gets the committee more involved Fall Quarter plus gives them a better understanding of the EPP in general.

Past years reveals:

• 2016: Golden Tickets with their name and position on it
• 2017: Different superhero icons for each position, their name on it
• 2018: Image of dinosaur holding the name card

Since the Vice Chair job is marketing heavy the design of the reveal falls into your job purview. Reveal has a lot of anxiety surrounding it (for everyone) so the reveal tends to be more on the fun side to make it more enjoyable. The reveal is usually a piece of paper that the winners can hold in front of them, is large enough to have legible art and wording, and is laminated so that the winners can keep them.

Since the design is related to your theme for elections, I recommend submitting the request for this design two-three weeks before elections so that you can get it in plenty of time. This year we were in a time crunch because we did reveal 3 hours after the polls closed, which did not give us enough time to have OComm put in names for us, so what we did was print out and reveal card with each position title on it and then we printed out each candidates name (we glued the name on after we learned the results). In past years the reveal has been the day after the polls closed, so OComm had time to input the names with enough time for us to print.

Interns

This past year we had three interns: Programming, Outreach, and Volunteer/Operations. The Programming intern is in charge mostly of the Kick-Off Fair that EAC puts on during the beginning of elections. The last few years this has been the first two days of elections, running at the same time as voting tables. It has usually been in Red Square and involves various things such as cotton candy machines, snow cone machines, game tents, photo booths, inflatable obstacle courses, and vender give aways (such as Monster energy drinks, Mighty O’s donuts, Peace tea, and Kind Bars to name a few). The outreach intern was in charge of marketing outreach with me, their main task at the beginning being reaching out to RSOs and student groups on campus to present about elections (ie. What EAC is, what ASUW is, and what elections are and how they can get involved either as candidates or by voting). Later on, the Outreach intern helped me with tasks such as designing the t-shirt and posters for elections. This year the Outreach intern was in charge of Dinosaur costume appearances to boost marketing, but that is a specific example of outreach she did. The Volunteer and Operations intern in in charge of recruiting volunteers to help with the voting booths over the three days of elections. They are also supposed to be your point person in charge of volunteers and voting booths during the three days of elections. They train the volunteers and make the elections tabling schedule. These are the three interns we had, but you are able to change around what you want. For example, the Outreach intern was new this year and honestly we could have utilized them more. Also, I talked to the Director of the Office of Communications from last year and she said that she is going to have an intern in OComm that deals exclusively with EAC. This means that EAC will have an intern in OComm doing all of the marketing requests, and you should set up a weekly meeting with this intern and have them come to the general committee meetings so that they know the context of everything for elections.

We hired interns in the beginning of Fall Quarter, and this is because we wanted to have the general committee meet a few times before the end of Fall Quarter and you should have interns before you select the general committee.

We had weekly meetings with the interns, Originally, the Chair and I meet with all three interns at the same time every week, trying to build a community feel so that they were familiar with each other. In Spring quarter we switched to having individual meetings with each Intern once a week before the committee meeting. This was necessary because in Spring quarter there is a lot more stuff that needs to get done and it becomes necessary to have a 30 minute meeting dedicated to each position.

Make sure to delegate stuff to your interns, it will help you balance the amount of work you have as well as make them feel more included in the elections process!

Committee

Every year the EAC Chair/Vice Chair select a group of students to be on the general committee. Typically, these general committee members are sorted into sub-committees, each sub-committee headed by an intern and tasked with responsibilities related to that interns area of focus. We selected 15 students to the general committee. I would recommend accepting more into the committee, because by the end of the year we only had 7 general committee members left due to lost interest or extenuating circumstances (such as health, classes, and volunteering on a friend’s campaign). We wanted to have the general committee meet a few times before the end of Fall Quarter to try to foster an idea of accountability to the group. In past years the general committee has started meeting at the beginning of winter quarter.

We felt like the committee has been under utilized in the past, so I would suggest looking at ways to change the style of how the general committee functions to give general committee members more of a job so that they feel like they are participating rather than just working.

The Vice Chair is the one who leads the committee meetings, so it is your job to make an agenda and facilitate the meeting. I have a folder in the google drive that holds all of the agendas for the committee meetings this year so feel free to look at that for reference. Typically how the meetings go is that we started with Roses and Thorns (they say one good thing and one bad thing that happened to them this past week, it’s to build familiarity between the members), then Vice Chair makes any announcements that need to be said to the whole group, then we do general committee business (if we had any), then we break up into sub-committees (interns lead these).

Marketing basically means you come up with the concept for all the flyers and social media ads used to communicate elections to UW students. All of the marketing I requested was for things such as: Ad to recruit interns, ad to recruit committee members, ads about the elections info sessions, ads for the candidacy filing deadline, ad to recruit volunteers, ads for voting days and voting booth locations, ad for board of director reveal, and etc. (there should be jpegs or pdfs of all of them either in the google drive or slack messages).

Here’s the link for the design requests (I bookmarked this link, given how often I used it): http://comm.asuw.org/design/

I’m not sure if having an OComm intern will change the process though, so make sure to find out exactly how they want you to communicate what you need them to design for you.

Outreach basically means what you do with those ads. We did a mix of a few methods: printing out 11×17 posters to put up in academic buildings/dorms/libraries/the IMA/the HUB, 3×4 hand bills to put in libraries and the HUB, social media ads (Facebook and Instagram – pay for them, it helps!), and general social media posts (posting on the ASUW Elections Facebook page, then sharing it on every Facebook page you know, posting on Instagram story, and on the elections website). Also 100% you should join every UW class page (Ie. Class of 2019, of 2020, 2021, and 2022), join UW major pages, and honestly any page with UW students so that you can reach as many of them with your posts as possible.

The Voter’s Guide is a newspaper style document that EAC compiles to have at our voting booths each year. It contains important dates/deadlines, locations of voting booths, and other various bits of information relevant for voters. Most importantly, the Voter’s Guide contains the pictures, platform, qualifications, and preliminary financial disclosures of every candidate running in elections. Additionally, it contains the ballot measures language, one pro statement, and one con statement. This is important because a lot of students do not follow elections and thus do not know about the candidates when they come up to our booth to vote.

Since this is a marketing material, Vice Chair is in charge of communicating with OComm to make the voter’s guide happen. In past years this meant meeting with an OComm graphic designer, as well as the SAO advisors and the Chair, to make sure that the style of the voter’s guide is how you want it and that it includes all the necessary material. There should be physical and electronic copies of past years Voter’s Guide, so take a look at those to get an idea of it’s past versions.

Kick Off Fair

The Kick Off Fair is really important for elections, free food always gets students to come over. We get a decent amount of voters from this event, so it’s important to make sure that it runs as smoothly as possible. Planning the Kick Off Fair is the programming intern’s main job, so they should be the point person for what I’m about to suggest but I wanted to include this so that you can convey the information to them: contact local businesses to get as many free food/drink donations as possible, HFS Area 01 let us rent their cotton candy and snow cone machines for free for multiple days, we reserved tables and tents from the RSO resource center (the tents made it seem really cohesive –I recommend reserving these at the beginning of Spring Quarter because they book up quickly), have two laptops there for people to vote at, contact Rainy Dawg Radio to DJ the event (have the Chair submit UUF’s for red square for permission), we rented a ‘game tent’ that had carnival games were you could throw things to get points (maybe try to add something active/engaging like this), make sure to have 3-4 people (interns, general committee, or volunteers) at the kick off fair to run the stations, and have a walkie talkie designated for whoever is in charge of the kick-off fair over the course of the event.

Voting Stations

Every year the number/location of stations tends to vary slightly. This year we had 4 stations during the day (9:30am-3:30pm) and 4 during the night (4:30pm-7:30pm). Our daytime stations were located at: Red Square, the Quad, in front of the HUB, and at Rainer Vista. Our nighttime locations were: in Oddegard, in McMahon, in front of the ECC, and 17th&45th (by the W). It is up to your to decide how many stations and at what times you want, but I would recommend doing as many as you think possible and that will reach as many students as possible. You technically have the ability to do up to 5 at one time, because this year we purchased 5 tents (so that we don’t waste money renting them each year) that have the ASUW logo on them so use as many of those as you want!

I would also recommend scheduling 3 volunteers to be at each voting booth for each hour shift. This is to help you if volunteers fail to show up for their shift, because technically the booths can function with 2 volunteers (or even 1 if necessary) but you want to have as many people at the booths as you can so that you can send volunteers to other booths should only 1 (or even no-one!) show up for the shift. This past year we had a ‘Member on Duty’ who was an EAC committee member that was scheduled for that shift and who all volunteers for that hour would check in with via text message, and they would be located at our most central booth (Red Square) so that they were easily accessible for any situations. I recommend having this so that you don’t have to get 15 text messages every hour or coordinate moving volunteers around if people don’t show up, it takes some of the stress off of you.

Your Schedule

Unfortunately, the unofficial rule of Elections is that the EAC Chair and Vice Chair are needed constantly. Basically, this means that you are so busy dealing with elections (and either big issues or smaller issues) that you don’t have time for anything else. The week of elections (the whole week, not just the three days) I basically worked from 6am until 11pm, and I ended up skipping all of my classes. I don’t recommend this, because you will end up exhausted and overworked. Perhaps you should try to coordinate with the Chair so that your class schedules in Spring Quarter do not overlap. Also, hold your volunteer intern more accountable: make sure they know that they will be needed. Same goes for their committee, they should be trained enough that you feel confident in letting one of them take over for two hours so that you can go to class.