Workshops on civic design, in person and online, for election offices across the country
This year we’ve traveled across the country talking to election officials (and community partners) about everything from designing better voter materials to accessibility in elections. So far we’ve been to:
- A state conference
- A community-based organization
- A monthly gathering of county-level administrators
- A state certification training course
- A national webinar
No matter what level of design expertise people have going in, they leave with practical tools they can apply to improve their election materials. Let us know if you’d like to bring one of these talks or workshops to your team.
We shared standards and resources for information design in Connecticut
At the annual Registrars of Voters Association of Connecticut conference, we were part of a 3-hour workshop with the U.S. Alliance for Elections Excellence about setting standards for election excellence. We focused on the standard for information design. Our goal was to demystify design jargon and empower election officials to make design changes to their voter materials.
The registrars were excited about the resources in the U.S. Alliance Resource Library. Tools that can help your information design include the civic icons and image library and an election website template.
We took a deep dive into design with community organizations in Ohio
Improving voting materials like a flier or form with design can be easy once you learn a few simple design best practices. We’ve had fun leading workshops and short introductory sessions through Zoom. At one 90-minute workshop, 20 people from a voter education organization in Ohio put on their design-thinking hats and brainstormed ways to make a voting information poster easier to read.
We’ve taught this workshop to both community-based organizations and election offices and find that regardless of the level of expertise participants have going into the workshop, they leave with practical tools they can apply to their election materials.
“This was really fascinating and informative and I 100% expect to use this information and those tools in our work.”
Workshop participant
“Great resources! We really appreciate you spending time to help Ohio voters.”
Workshop participant
We introduced a guide to creating poll worker manuals in North Carolina
One of the newest additions to the Resource Library is a toolkit for creating poll worker manuals. We visited a monthly Huddle – a series of virtual meetings for election officials in North Carolina. Over 260 election officials from every county in the state joined us for a 45-minute presentation that covered how to incorporate color, compress large PDF file sizes and other challenges election officials face when updating their poll worker manuals.
The poll worker manual toolkit includes a manual template made in Microsoft Word, a how-to guide for using the template and a guide full of our best design tips.
We taught 3 civic design skills for a state certification program in Utah
We led a full-day hands-on in-person course for 60 election officials earning a state certification. We covered 3 core skills of civic design: plain language, information design, and usability testing. The day went by fast with in-person exercises, like spotting common plain language pitfalls and practicing a usability test. There are plenty of resources introducing these core skills on our website, but a live group workshop is an engaging and fun way to learn. Participants left ready to start updating their election office’s own materials.
We spoke about accessibility on a panel hosted by the Elections Group
We joined other experts for a 1-hour panel Accessibility and Elections: How to Better Serve Voters with Disabilities. The panel discussed ways to address accessibility challenges in polling places and election information. Some of the themes covered were that accessibility is not a one-size-fits-all solution but is adapted to the needs of each election office. As always, we focused on resources available to tackle these challenges.
You can watch the webinar and find a list of resources on The Elections Group website. The other speakers included Michelle Bishop from the National Disability Rights Network, Matthew J. Kelly from the Franklin County (Ohio) Board of Elections, and Kathryn Summers, Ph.D. from the University of Baltimore.
We have civic design workshops ready to go.
Our most popular workshops are on plain language, information design and usability testing. We run online or in-person workshops on multiple topics and can adapt them to your specific audience and needs. Let us know how we can help your office or organization.