Information for Organizations and Advocacy Groups

If you belong to an organization or advocacy group active during the municipal election, there are several ways waterlooregionvotes.org can cooperate with you to get your message out.

This website is non-partisan and does not advocate for any particular candidate or issue, but we are eager to link to election-related information on the site, including work done by advocacy groups.

Based on previous elections, we predict that several thousand people will visit waterlooregionvotes.org during the campaign period. Many will visit the week before the election. If you hold an event, record a debate, or publish a questionnaire, having us link that material on your website puts it in a central hub voters will visit as they do their election research. Posting your efforts to social media is fine, but often such posts get lost in the stream of content online.

Events

If you are organizing an event (a debate, a candidate meet and greet, an information session…) related to the election please let us know about it. Provide us with the date and time of your event, which position(s) it applies to, and a website link where you are advertising the event. (Make sure that link is public and does not require a login in order to access.)

Ideally, you should get us information about events you are organizing at least a week in advance. A longer leadtime is better.

All-Candidate Meeting Recordings

If you are organizing an all-candidates meeting or debate, please try to get the meeting recorded and uploaded to a multimedia sharing platform like YouTube or archive.org . Then send us a link to the meeting recording.

All-candidates meetings are the best way for voters to learn about their candidates, so we are trying to get as many of them linked on the website as possible.

If you are asking questions of candidates, have the moderator say the candidate name before each candidate gives their answer. This is very useful to those voters who listen to the audio of all-candidates meetings and do not watch the video.

If you are running an all-candidates meeting but are unclear how to record it (or do not have the capacity to do so) then please get in touch with us; depending on our volunteer availability we may be able to help.

If you would like to organize an all-candidates meeting but are not sure of how to go about it, here are some guides:

• Your Guide to Hosting an All-Candidates Meeting published by the Canadian Unitarian Council: Comprehensive. Not every group will want to follow every recommendation, but it is worth being alert to the issues this guide raises.
• Organizing an All Candidates Meeting published by the Canadian Federation of University Women Ontario Council: A concise outline of what to organize.

Questionnaires

Many organizations put out questionnaires on specific issues for municipal candidates. These are great resources for voters, so we would like to link to them.

Ideally, questionnaires should include the full text of the responses given by candidates. Some advocacy groups choose to interpret those responses and “grade” the candidates on their responses. That is fine, but it is very helpful to publish the full text as well.

When possible, it is best to publish questionnaire results as HTML pages, as opposed to PDF or Word documents. This is much easier for voters to navigate.

AI search engines also seem to process plain HTML pages better than PDFs, for some reason. That is important if you want the results of your questionnaire to be factored into the “AI Overview” summaries search engines provide these days. Somewhat unfortunately, many many voters will be asking AI models to help them choose who to vote for.

Having said that, publishing PDFs is better than not publishing the results of your questionnaire at all. Do what you can.

Questionnaires are best organized by position (for example, “Regional Council for Kitchener”, “Wilmot Ward 2”), with a unique link or section for each position. This helps voters navigate your questionnaire more effectively. If every position has a unique link then we can include those links in specific position pages on our website.

Please publish the results of your questionnaire on a site that is publicly-accessible, and does not require an account to access.

As with meeting recordings, if you have questions or would like assistance in posting your questionnaires in an easy-to-consume format, please contact us. We will not host your questionnaire, and we will not promise to do all the work for you, but we may be able to help in some meaningful ways.

Tell Us About Local Media Items

Neighbourhood associations and other organizations often have a good sense of what is happening locally. If you are aware of debates, questionnaires, or other media that is being locally produced then please let us know about them. We can only link what we know about, and having many people watching out for media items is much more effective than having only a handful of volunteers trying to watch everything.

Spread the Word

Please let your membership and others in your networks know about waterlooregionvotes.org. If you send out newsletters or email blasts, please mention us in them. If you hold meetings, please give us a mention. Ask your membership to spread the word as well. This website is intended to help all voters in Waterloo Region make informed voting decisions, and that means spreading the word.