Election Runner will automatically send your voters an email with instructions to vote as soon as your election starts, but it’s also possible to use a 3rd party email service (like MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc.) to send the emails. This is only necessary if you want to….

• Send the emails from your organizations email address instead of noreply@electionrunner.com
• Customize the email template
• Customize the email subject
• Customize the content of the email
• Use a language other than English

The first step is to import all of your voters into Election Runner. When you’re ready to launch your election, you will need to export your list of voters from the voters page.

You can then import this file into the 3rd party email service of your choice where you have full control over your email template and content. Almost all services allow the use of “custom fields” to do a “mail merge” where you can add user specific information into the body of the emails.

Using MailChimp as an example, you can utilize merge tags and embed each voter’s Voter ID & Voter Key into the email. Within the export file with all of your voters is a column named “Voting URL”. This URL can be embedded into the content of your email and when clicked it will take the voter to your election and automatically log them in to vote. That way they don’t have to manually type in their Voter ID & Voter Key.

IMPORTANT - If you do not want Election Runner to send an email to your voters when the election starts, then you will need to disable this setting under your election settings.