Success Story: South River Electric Membership Corporation

Client Profile:

South River Electric Membership Corporation is an electric distribution cooperative that serves 42,000 consumers/members of Harnett, Cumberland, Sampson, Johnston and Bladen counties in North Carolina. South River Electric’s mission is to provide safe, reliable and affordable power to its members.

Client Challenge:

As South River Electric’s Manager of Human Resources and Executive Secretary for the board of directors, I help serve the organization in the following ways:

• Keep the board informed of membership issues
• Report on state of the business
• Act as voice of the customer at board meetings
• Manage employee resources

For the first time in 25 years our cooperative was faced with running an election. A group of members came forward to oppose three seats on our board. Members are our number one priority – we wanted to make sure that our membership knew that we were dedicated to a fair and transparent election process. We needed to provide an election that resulted in zero suspicion.

SBS Solution:

Another cooperative in the region recommended Survey & Ballot Systems (SBS) as a third-party to manage elections. SBS helped us plan on-site voting, produced a perfect ballot and inspected the facility prior to the election.

Election Day arrived; SBS handled the voting professionally and efficiently. We were thankful we didn’t have to worry about this as we were busy with the campaigning and commotion of the event. There was an enormous turnout of voters and spectators due to the media covering the concerns of the member group. In the end, we had no complaints or challenges to our election process. In my mind, that made the election a success.

“I could not have asked for more professional assistance in dealing with our first time experience of elections at our annual meeting.” ~Kathy McPhail, Manager of Human Resources