Setting Up Your Campaign on BallotWinners, in the Order That Works

Do this in the order below and setting up takes an afternoon.

Do it in the order most campaigns use, which begins with collecting volunteers, and you will spend the next twelve months repairing records that were attached to nothing. The order matters because each step is the thing the next step hangs on.

Step one: your own profile, before anything else

The platform will not let you register as a candidate until your user profile is complete.

That is intentional and it saves an argument later. A candidacy is attached to a person, and a person with half a record produces a campaign where nobody can be certain who authorised what. Fill in your details properly once. Everything downstream inherits them.

Step two: the seat, and the election it belongs to

Register the candidacy: which of the six seats, and where.

President is national. Governor, Senator and County Woman Representative are county-wide. An MP contests one of the 290 constituencies and an MCA one of the 1,450 wards. Choosing the seat also chooses your geography, which is why this comes before you type a single volunteer's name.

The candidacy attaches to an election cycle, so every record you create afterwards belongs to 2027 rather than floating free. That mechanism is described in every screen knows which election you are in.

Step three: geography, not people

Now pull your ground, and read it before you recruit against it.

Open every ward in your seat and list the polling centres and the polling stations inside them. Write down the totals. That station count is the number your agent recruitment has to reach, and it is almost always higher than the figure a campaign carries in its head, because centres contain several stations each.

While you are there, compare the register figure against the census figure for the same wards. The gap is your unregistered population, and voter registration is the only activity that adds voters rather than moving them between candidates.

Step four: your team, then your volunteers

A campaign team is a small number of people with defined jobs and real access.

Set that up before the volunteer intake, because somebody has to approve volunteers and somebody has to be responsible for each ward. Access follows role on the platform, so appointing a ward coordinator is not a title, it changes what that person can see and do.

Then bring in volunteers. Enter the names you already hold, approve deliberately, and attach every approved person to a ward with a coordinator over them. The workflow and the reasoning are in the volunteer workflow.

Step five: agents, far earlier than feels necessary

Polling agents are the last thing to set up and the first thing to start.

You already have the station list from step three. Assign named people to stations now, in 2026, leaving the gaps visible so you can see them. A coverage screen full of holes twelve months out is a work plan. The same screen in the last fortnight before 10 August 2027 is a crisis, and there is no recruiting drive that closes it at that point.

Why this order and not another

Each step is the denominator for the one after it.

You cannot measure volunteer coverage without knowing the wards. You cannot know the wards without the seat. You cannot set an agent target without the station list. And you cannot approve anybody until there is somebody with the authority to approve them.

Campaigns that start with volunteers end up with a long list of people attached to no ward, supporting no specific candidacy, in no particular election, which is a mailing list rather than a field operation. The point of the platform is the difference between those two things, which is the argument in what BallotWinners is for.

So start this week by completing your profile and registering the candidacy. That is thirty minutes of work.

Then spend a real afternoon on step three with a pen, because the station count is the single number the rest of your campaign is sized against, and getting it in 2026 costs nothing but an afternoon.