DDSN Interactive partnered with NSW Police Association to create a secure, load tested voting website for their membership.
"One of the mission critical pieces of work we have relied upon DDSN for is the process of staging a whole of membership Vote on Pay settlement offers. For 2021 DDSN created a sub-site that met all of the criteria needed - from high security through to an authentication step to validate voting, the handling of high volume traffic and access to data on the progress of the Vote for a period of two weeks.
The process was seamless and received compliments from our Executive as working police officers for the ease and experience it provided. This was a real feather in the DDSN cap and one we were extremely grateful was in their safe and professional hands".
Stephen Olsen
PANSW Communications Manager
The Challenge
The NSW Police Association represents the professional and industrial interests of approximately 16,500 members, covering all ranks of sworn police officers in NSW. Every few years their Pay Award is reviewed and voted on by the membership. The date for this vote is not set in stone, therefore in the past it had been a problem being ready enough for the influx of votes coming in to the site at short notice.
DDSN proposed a standalone voting site that could be ready at short notice for events such as this. It was decided that a separate site would be best, as speed and load can be an issue with that many people accessing the site in a short amount of time.
It needed to be as useable and accessible on smart phones and tablets, as it was on desktop computers.
The Solution
In the months leading up to the vote DDSN created the site and spent time streamlining as much as possible. We were not sure when the vote would be announced, so it was important to be ready within 24 hours notice.
The site consists of a login, content and a video about the award, and a voting form. The site was load tested to make sure that at it's highest load it would still work effectively.
The security of the site needed to only allow registered officers to access and vote. Voting was allowed only once, but users were able to revisit the site as many times as they wanted for content updates.
Once the vote was announced we made sure that all the logins were enabled, the server had enough resources and the content on the site was correct. SMS & email communications were sent out. These were staggered to make sure that people didn't hit the site all at once.
PANSW admins were given a secure area in which to view results as they came in.
The Result
The site had over 26,000 visitors in 24 hours. At the peak there were 1300 simultaneous users on the site. The site didn't miss a beat.
This shows that forward planning can make all the difference in an event such as this. Rigorous testing allowed us to be confident that it would work as expected, and we were pleased to confirm that it did.
Have a look at some of the other digital experiences we have created:
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