Membership Elections and AGMs

Formerly known as Electoral Reform Services (ERS), we work with a wide range of membership organisations to deliver good governance through secure and transparent elections, consultations and decision-making. 

From elections to boards, councils or committees to voting at AGMs, we ensure your members can take part in decision-making quickly, easily and securely. We help you to engage members and maximise turnout through effective multi-channel communications tailored for your audience.

End-to-end support, unrivalled expertise

We act as Independent Scrutineer for hundreds of membership organisations, from charities and voluntary organisations, professional bodies, institutions and societies to political parties.  Our end-to-end election management ensures the integrity of the process and the result, whether you use traditional voting methods, digital solutions, or a blend of both. 

Political parties appoint us to administer their internal elections or to be their independent scrutineer because they trust our independence, impartiality and integrity. Whether for a party’s leadership election, candidate short-listing, officer elections, primaries or consultative ballots, we deliver an impartial service with results that are trusted by all.

For postal ballots, we support you from start to finish, delivering everything from design, print and mailing of voting materials to receipt and count of returned ballots or proxy voting forms for AGMs. 

CESvotes offers a user friendly online voting solution combined with features to help you engage voters and maximise turnout. We also offer digital strategies to help organisations that want to move away from print-only elections. 

Our dedicated team has unrivalled expertise and knowledge of managing elections for membership organisations. Uniquely, all our operations are in-house, assuring the security of your ballot, quick response times and turnaround, as well as significant cost savings.

Supporting our customers with remote and virtual solutions

Many of our customers have been required to hold their AGMs or other governance events over the last few months, facing unprecedented challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Together, we provided virtual meetings and video streaming solutions to enable their members to participate at these meetings and ensure good governance and democratic decision-making could continue.

Get in touch to discuss how we can support you.

Our services for membership organisations include:

• Returning Officer and Independent Scrutineer – we often act as both Independent Scrutineer and Returning Officer - for elections, proxy voting and attending in person for AGM, EGM or SGM voting.
• Nomination management – online with CESnominate or by post
• Design, print and mailing – our secure in-house end-to-end services give you full control of the process, quick response times and turnaround, as well as significant cost savings
• Online voting and engagement platform – fast, easy to use and secure online voting for your members, with features to help drive engagement, promote your election and maximise turnout
• Digital strategy – helping you to transition from print-only elections, saving time and money while ensuring continued engagement and participation for all your stakeholders 
• Customer support team - an experienced team to manage enquiries from your members
• Fee collections, donations and appeals - compliant processing of direct debits, online/telephone card payments, cheques and cash. We guarantee a three-day turnaround from receipt of payment to your account.

We have been delighted with how well things have worked with our first steps into a world that included online voting. This was a big step for the Club and it was very reassuring to work with an organisation who had such a wealth of experience. This made things relatively straightforward for us and the outcomes speak for themselves.
Jamie Clifford, Assistant Secretary (Membership & Operations), Marylebone Cricket Club