Success Story: Association of Professional Flight Attendants
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Summary
When the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA) faced the challenge of modernizing their voting process for electing members to their Executive Committee, they looked to the Committee Chair of the National Ballot Committee, Adam Brooks. Adam’s objective was to search for a solution that would bring them into the digital age. After finding Survey & Ballot Systems (SBS) and learning about our Real-time Voting Software, he was eager to implement the platform at their next ad hoc election held yearly at their Annual Convention.
About
The Association of Professional Flight Attendants is a storied labor union representing American Airlines. Founded in 1977, APFA now represents over 28,000 flight attendants from all corners of the United States. Its membership is divided among 10 bases throughout the country, which all have their own elected representatives, all 10 Base Presidents make up the Board of Directors. Presiding as an intermediary between their base’s membership, and their National Officers, is their Executive Committee, five of which are ad hoc positions that are elected to the committee by the Base Presidents (Board of Directors).
The Challenge
APFA had long maintained a tradition of utilizing paper ballots and other outdated means such as poster boards, sticky notes, and notepads at their Annual Convention for electing their ad hoc positions to the Executive Committee. The process included runoffs and multiple rounds of voting. This method was incredibly arduous and caused frustration for the Board of Directors, meeting attendees, and it also prolonged the length of their meetings each year. AFPA had long used this tedious method of electing the ad hoc members.
On the tailwinds of this inefficient method, and with the new leadership at the helm of APFA, Adam and his committee made it a top priority to find a solution to handle their voting flawlessly in the digital age. They began the RFP process with organizational expectations sky-high from their previous electronic voting experiences with other vendors that left them feeling frustrated.
The Solution
After spending some time online researching potential vendors, Adam visited SBS’ website, where he began to dive into the various voting solutions and software. Adam spoke with an SBS election expert to learn more about DirectVoteLive, the real-time voting solution, to see if it would be a good fit for their upcoming ad hoc meeting.
“SBS was incredibly professional, and highlighted exactly how DirectVoteLive could work for our situation”, said Brooks. DirectVoteLive would enable their Board of Directors to cast their votes in a matter of seconds and for their results to be instantly tabulated, as well as being able to adjust rounds of voting on the fly with runoffs, which is precisely what they were looking for.
Adam, along with many of his committee members, were relatively new to not only the National Ballot Committee but to the ad hoc voting process as well. So, having an election partner who is well-versed in best practices for union governance, and is dedicated to the success of their clients ultimately led them to choose SBS as their ad hoc election partner.
The Results
Ultimately, APFA’s goal was to restore the integrity of their voting process with their members, and leadership, along with providing a secure and easy way for the Board of Directors to vote electronically. The utilization of DirectVoteLive for their ad hoc election did just that. It turned a process that often took hours on end previously, into a 5-minute vote the first year using it. The second year using DirectVoteLive for the ad hoc election was more complicated with the amount of nominees and those running, but DirectVoteLive again made this process smooth and very fast, and showed their leadership that electronic voting is a viable option for their governance.
After their voting concluded, Adam was flooded with compliments from the Board, “they couldn’t believe it” he said, recounting the past two Annual Conventions, “this is an incredible improvement, we should’ve done this years ago!”, “I wish we could vote like this for everything, it’s so easy to use.”
Riding the wave of the success of this change, Adam and his committee continue to look at several other areas within their organization to streamline the voting and nominations process with electronic solutions.