We are happy to share with you web application YouVote for public voting and evaluation of competitions or contests! It’s free, easy-to-use and safe!
YouVote is a web-based application that enables you to create rating contests and view the results in real time. Your audience can join live the decision making process on their smartphones, tables and desktops, without installing anything.
Originally designed for the participants’ voting for best EaP Civil Society Hackathon projects, the YouVote can be applied anywhere you need your audience’s say on the final decision: electing board members, deciding on the project ideas to be supported, or simply choosing the best place to hold your event!
And it is completely free: once installing the application on your server, you will be able to start a new voting in less than 5 minutes, run as many voting contests as you need, engage unlimited number of voters and never lose the results of the previous votes.
YouVote has been designed with the needs of civil society activists and communities in mind. Here are just some of its main features:
- Your contests, voters, voting process and results will never be used or published by third parties, in exchange of free use of applications. Your digital safety and privacy of your supporters is controlled by you only.
- You can decide who has the right to see each contest and to vote, by directly inviting them to the voting through their email addresses. Thus you will get the most trusted results for each voting, and of course, you can easily adjust the voters’ list anytime, by deleting or adding voters, changing their permissions and updating personal details.
- There will be no inflated ratings, as the system does not allow multiple votes by the same users. Moreover, you can set up the system to stop voters vote for themselves or their own projects, by simply matching voters in question with the relevant contenting projects in their profiles!
- The voting results are completely transparent: while users can see average score for each contending project or a person, you will have detailed data for each of them (total, average and for each contender) that you can also download in the excel format.
- You can easily adjust all elements of each contest to your needs – title, description, cover photo, voting time, evaluation scale and criteria, contending projects, and, of course, voters; no need to know how to write a code.
So how does the YouVote application work?
Step 1: Download the free copy of the YouVote application on GitHub, install it on your server and customise its appearance according to your branding. This is the only time you might need some help.
Step 2: In the admin page, set up a new rating contest, by giving it a title, period of voting and evaluation scale (from 1 to 100), and adding at least one contending project and one evaluation criteria. It will take you less than 5 minutes, check our user guide video! You can edit the list of projects or evaluation criteria any time, by adding new ones, or editing and/or deleting existing.
Step 3: Publish your contest and add the voters. You can always add new voters (it takes less than 1 minute to add a voter – check this guide video) or edit existing ones by assigning them to the newly created contest. Registered voters will receive an invitation email and will be able to see the voting contest immediately, but they will be able to cast their votes only within the timeframe you set up, as the voting opens and closes automatically at the set date & time. Voting process is native for users, but you can always share our short video instructions on how to vote with your voters.
Step 4: Monitor the voting results live, and do not forget to download the summary of the contest and results of each contender for good reporting and evidence based decision making!
YouVote is an open source product, which means you can freely download, use and modify it. It is licensed under GNU General Public License v3.0 / Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 as its equivalent: you can check the YouVote page for more details on the conditions of use and attribution.
