The social impact of Internet voting.

Turning fifty is always a reason for celebration and, in Cinfa's case, it could not be less. That is why we wanted to take advantage of this special milestone to recognize and give voice to the patient organizations that work every day to improve the quality of life of patients and their families.  With this goal in mind, in 2019 we launched the initiative "Cinfa: Contigo 50 y más", a solidarity action that encouraged all patient organizations in Spain to present their social and health intervention projects in a web portal enabled for this purpose.

Over the course of almost four months, more than 600 projects were presented and more than 1.2 million votes were received, thanks to the work carried out by patient organisations to publicise their initiatives to the public. Also thanks to the support of the Spanish pharmacies, which, with the 'Pharmacies with Soul' label, acted as ambassadors for the initiative. The 50 most voted projects were recognized by Cinfa with an economic endowment of 5,000 euros to help their implementation.

At a technical level, and to ensure that the voting system open to citizens was transparent and controlled at all times, Cinfa had the collaboration of Minsait. The technology consultancy firm, owned by Indra, supervised the mechanisms implemented to ensure that each electronic device cast a single vote throughout the process. For this purpose, a series of technical limitations were defined for the identification by IP, device and browser (cookie) of the votes.

In addition, during the course of these votes, Minsait conducted a technical audit process that allowed us to take preventive measures in order to avoid any incidents, especially during the last days of the campaign when a higher volume of votes was expected. At the same time, it also carried out an active listening on social networks (Twitter and Facebook) to monitor their activity and conversation, which allowed us to detect issues of interest to them and to strengthen communication with patient organizations.

Thanks to this joint collaboration with Minsait, we have been able to get even closer to patients, the core of our anniversary, through a clear and rigorous monitoring process. An experience full of learning and stories of people, which are our reason for being as a laboratory.