Award Force

Avantages

Très bon suivi de l'équipe AwardForce, prise en main facilité par des rendez-vous en visio.Possibilité de branding intéressante !

Inconvénients

Demande beaucoup de temps pour la configuration, beaucoup de détails auquel il faut penser. Pas évident lorsque ce n'est pas son métier.

Avantages

Une plateforme bien conçue et simple d'utilisation.
Un service support très réactif, patient et à l'écoute.
Les utilisateurs (jurys et candidats) n'ont pas manqué de nous exprimer leur satisfaction (parcours de candidature intuitif, intérêt pour les jurys de noter des candidatures avec des fiches normalisées, de pouvoir consulter l'avis des autres jurys...)
Nous n’avons probablement pas exploité l’outil au maximum de ses capacités, mais nous nous améliorerons la prochaine fois!

Inconvénients

Difficulté pour envoyer des mails à seulement certaines personnes d'une catégorie (sans les faire un par un)
Lors des création des membres du jurys, nous leur avons envoyé un mail avec un lien pour réinitialiser leur mot de passe et accéder à leurs candidatures à noter : beaucoup revenaient vers nous pour nous dire qu'ils ne connaissaient pas leur mot de passe et ne comprenaient pas pourquoi ils devaient le réinitialiser alors qu'ils n'avaient rien créé.
Plusieurs aussi s'étaient déjà créé un compte candidat avant de recevoir l'invitation, donc ne retrouvaient pas les candidatures qu'ils devaient noter.

Avantages

Regrouper toutes les étapes d'une même opération

Inconvénients

La plateforme est complexe à la première utilisation, il faut suivre les étapes une à une pour pouvoir bien le prendre en main

Avantages

I couldn't recommend AwardsForce more highly for their platform. NDS uses it for 3 Awards programs and it is extremely user friendly, as well as being highly accessible for people who require alt text, screen readers, etc.

Inconvénients

Pricing is a bit high for the Pro tier however we've been able to manage with the Growth plan.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Award Force

Avantages

I love that the system is highly customiseable, and responsive to our needs. The fact that it is so customiseable makes it easy to make mistakes - but the robust customer support and configuration support mean any mistakes I make are quickly spotted before launch.

Inconvénients

We use the platform for Awards, and for Scholarships and Grants. Some of our scholarship programs used to be run on the Awards section. We are moving them to Scholarships and Grants. However, historic applications are stuck in the Awards section, and I have had to build the forms again from scratch.

Avantages

The How To videos are excellent. They are clear, and not too long or complicated.

Inconvénients

Maybe that the content blocks, when altered, they change across all seasons. I haven't actually used this function yet, but I am thinking it would be good if the changes were only to current season, so that we can go back and check historical data for comparison.

Avantages

The structure, the analysis report, export the data I received. allow the attachment for people submission

Inconvénients

there are some bugs happened in last couple of days when I open my nomination process to large audience.

Avantages

Award Force has an enormous strength, and that is the support team. There is always someone who answers my questions, no matter what time of day I submit them. The service is 5-star, and everyone I've been in contact with in the team is so helpful and clear in their explanations.

Inconvénients

I can' t come up with any right now. I can' t come up with any right now. :)

Avantages

I am writing to express our immense satisfaction and gratitude for the exceptional service provided by Award Force. As the premier platform for recognising and celebrating outstanding achievements in the music industry, the Aotearoa Music Awards couldn't be more thrilled with the seamless experience Award Force has delivered.

From the moment we adopted Award Force for our awards submission process, it became evident that we had made a wise choice. The user-friendly interface has significantly simplified the nomination process for our artists and industry professionals, enhancing their overall experience. The intuitive design allows for smooth navigation, ensuring that entrants can easily showcase their talent and accomplishments.

The customization options provided by Award Force have been instrumental in tailoring the platform to meet our specific needs. It's refreshing to work with a platform that adapts to the diverse requirements of our awards program.

We look forward to trying out the judging system in the coming months.

Moreover, the exceptional customer support provided by the Award Force team, in particular [sensitive content hidden] , has been invaluable. Their responsiveness, expertise, and dedication to ensuring our success have surpassed our expectations. It's evident that Award Force not only delivers a top-notch product but also places a high priority on building lasting relationships with its clients.

Award Force has proven to be a game-changer for the Aotearoa Music Awards. The platform's innovative features, customisation options, and unparalleled support have elevated our awards process to new heights. We look forward to continuing our partnership with Award Force and highly recommend it to any organisation seeking a reliable and efficient awards management solution.

Inconvénients

Using the review flow process feels like it has to many steps (but that may be my process building!)
It would also be great to be able to customise the home page for judges to customise what fields are shown

Avantages

We were incredibly excited to implement AwardForce as we needed something to revamp our judging processes. The customer service provided was phenomenal- truly the best my manager and I have ever had. Whenever you have a question, the team is there to support you. Our contest was quite complex and has been running without the help of the judging software for several years so we were thrilled to know AwardForce was there every step of the way to ensure our contest was successfully built out on their platform. Shoutout to Marco - a wonderful customer service rep on this team who met with us for our one-on-one support sessions!

Inconvénients

There were several things we would have liked to see on AwardForce, little "nice to haves" that would have made certain finicky parts of our contest operations a bit easier, that we were unable to make work with the current platform. Some examples include:
- A way for judges to sort their assignments in VIP judging from highest to lowest score without needing to navigate to the leaderboard
- Allowing commenting at every judging phase, including PASS/FAIL rounds
- Having YES/NO dropdown fields instead of numerical 0/1 dropdown fields when evaluating submissions

However, I know the product team is always implementing new features so I feel confident that the product will continue to get better and better with time!

Avantages

The platform is user-friendly, streamlining the entire awards process from submission to judging. Setting up categories, managing entries, and customising forms is straightforward.
Our judges find it easy to navigate and assess entries, making scoring and feedback seamless.

Inconvénients

Would be useful to get an aggregated view of all the judges comments and have some sentiment analysis available.

Avantages

They have the best customer service! They help out very quickly and always help me fix my problems.

Inconvénients

It is a little bit tricky at times and dives very deep.

Avantages

Its a very robust an easy-to-use platform.

Inconvénients

It takes some focus to get it all set up. But it's well worth it.

Avantages

Excellent Support Team
Easily Configurable Items and Features

Inconvénients

It takes a lot of effort to set up properly the forms and the blocks. The process can be done easier-come confusing elements.

Avantages

great overview for entries and easy to manage

Inconvénients

creating an account for every single award and limited search funktion

Avantages

Award Force is so easy to use, yet delivers a thoroughly comprehensive solution. The system is so clear, intuitive and logical it's an absolute pleasure to use. You can navigate your way around without ever getting lost or confused, everything is exactly where you'd expect to find it and you always feel completely in control.

From the clean and clear layout you may initially be fooled into thinking it's not very sophisticated, but you'd be wrong. It delivers everything you need, and much much more, they've just worked very hard to make sure you don't have to.
Whilst you have the ability to customise the site so you are able to reflect your brand and visual identity, you don't have to be a designer or web developer to understand it. I've never felt out of my depth configuring anything on Award Force and nothing has ever felt onerous, just simple and straightforward providing the result you were hoping for quickly and easily.

The versatility of the system means I've never had to compromise and can have the exact set-up I want without it taking an age to change hundreds of settings, it just lets you choose exactly what you want then replicate it as many times as you wish.

The extensive reference guides and online tutorials are an amazing resource, if you're unsure of anything you can have the answer within a few minutes - usually with a step by step guide!

Inconvénients

I have to confess that I have struggled with this question, but the ability to sort by all of the fields within a view would be helpful. It would also be helpful to be able to configure bespoke reports for export, but it's not exactly a chore to have everything exported and then just choose to keep the ones you want.

The things I've mentioned above may well be possible, I'm by no means an expert on every aspect of the system and I find new features and options every week!

Avantages

We use it to allow design students to upload their work at the end of the year. Setting the system up to meet our requirements was challenging because there are so many options, but once it was configured the students found it very easy to upload their work, and even sent some fan mail. They could revise their entries up to the deadline, we could specify the acceptable file types and everything worked smoothly. We also invited reviewers to comment on the work , that too was very easy on the user end.

Inconvénients

There are a few odd things here: it is , for instance, not possible to sort all entrants by their last name, only by their first. If a judge is already in the AF system they have to use their previous password to log in which can cause confusion. With the help of AF we set up an algorithm that randomly assigned student work to reviewers and you would think that it would be easy for the computer to do this evenly, but it turned out that the some judges got only 10 assignments and others as many as 16. One complaint judges had was that they did not get any sort of confirmation after they completed the reviews that were assigned to them. There were a few questions I did not know to ask at the initial setup. I DID ask if there was a file size limit for the upload (the answer is no) but I did not ask if the file sizes have an effect on the download. The answer here is: yes, definitely! This may not matter for users who deal with text files, but in the design world files get big, and when I tried to download all the work to local drives it turned out that large files (almost ALL of ours) could not be downloaded in bulk, but in batches of about 10, and extra large ones had to be done separately, This is almost a deal killer, but hopefully can be avoided next time with file size limits during upload. MY number one item on a wishlist: create an option for a one stop download of ALL selected files.

Avantages

The ease of use on the user and the administrator ends was great. The administration learning process was not complex and Award Force staff took the time to train us. The entry process for the users worked so well. It was simple! The part that sold our organization was the wrap-up portion. We didn't have to do much of anything and the program did it for us. Our members could login and see the winners' entries. This saved our admins a ton of time compiling award winners and sending them out to everyone. That was an amazing process! I would definitely recommend this, and have, to other organizations if they want to go all digital and have a simple back-end process to administer, and help the users get their information entered and then received quickly.

Inconvénients

Like any software, you have to learn it. It takes a little time at first to learn, but once you do, it is not hard to utilize. The Award Force team was very helpful through that process, though. There are some unique ways to find information within the software, so it just takes working with it to gain an understanding. The payment system was something that we had to inform our membership of, since this software is based in Australia, when using an United States credit card, it is best to charge all entries at one time and not individually, as they card will question foreign purchases and possibly shut the card off temporarily. This happened to us, but once we realized why, we explained it to the membership and then it worked fine.

Avantages

The support for the setup and for the time when we ran this years' contest was perfect (and we are not quick on the draw with such very good ratings) and the support is one of the main reasons why we intend to further work with Award Force. In cases where support was needed very urgently and quickly, the response was fast and very competent. The broad range of features gave the flexibility which we needed when we set up the contest for the first time. The pre-configured features made setup and use during the contest easy and convenient. The evaluation options of the judging results were very comfortable and at the same time so detailed that we got very good bases (Excel files) for our own evaluations.

Inconvénients

In some respects, the user interface was not very convenient/user-friendly for the judges in the case of our contest (too much scrolling, something like an overview table was missing).

Avantages

Everything.

Award Force is by far the best awards and judging platform I have used. Once you understand it and how the modules integrate with each other, it is ridiculously smooth and easy to use. Only the other day, I set up my next season. The longest part was inputting the name.

Adding entries is quick and smooth. Modifying or cloning takes seconds. The judging platform is very comprehensive and the platform as a whole is designed with the end user in mind.

It will be two years since we signed up to Award Force in January and we have no intention of changing. It has made my job easier and freed my time up to grow my role and support my team elsewhere. Moreover, our entrants and judges regularly compliment us on choosing Award Force.

It's a great system. Thoroughly recommended. I could go on but no need to. It's that good......

The support is wonderful and everybody at Award Force is knowledgable, responsive, professional, very timely, and friendly. A pleasure to work with...

Inconvénients

Can't think of anything....the only two tiny little things:

1. The PDF headers can be a bit overwhelming (it would be nice if we could resize them)
2. Could do with extending the broadcast facility a bit so that you can filter who you send messages to more

But I stress these are tiny little issues that do not actually affect my work

Avantages

We only do a once-a-year grant award so the price seems reasonable for what we do. It has been a game changer for us. Previously we had lots of spreadsheets and it took one staffer a great deal of time to get the packets together. Then, it was reams of paper to get a copy of each grant into the hands of our judges. Now, it is as easy as entering some basic information and the program is virtual!

Inconvénients

Setting up year two was a bit confusing and required that we set up a time to chat with customer service. Once did that, everything was good.

Avantages

We really like the ease of copying entries for entrants, to make it easier for them to submit multiple entries (if eligible). The variety of judging options is also very helpful, enabling us to select the best type of judging for that particular instance, rather than doing a workaround on a static judging process.

Inconvénients

While there isn't a lot I don't like about AwardForce, it would be helpful to provide an accessibility colour checker/palette - we recently changed sponsor, so had to change the theme colours, and it was difficult to test the colours with all of the design nuances, to ensure the theme a) looked good and b) was fully accessible to people who have eyesight challenges.

Avantages

Having previously run our annual awards program via submission of hard copy entries from entrants in 2017 we moved to use Award Force software - allowing us to build a custom online platform via which entrants could submit their entry portfolios, and we could easily manage the process from the back end/administrative end of the entry portal. A seamless operation - and very easy to use - allowing us to monitor rate of entry, auto respond to entrants, and obviously the great benefit of being able to digitally store a huge amount of data/info instead of our previous headache of having excessive paper copies. The software has been exceptional value for money. Award Force provided excellent upfront training in how best to use the software and also provided an excellent back up service for any small glitches that might arise in initial use. All in all it has been a fantastic purchase for our organisation and one which we wish we had probably made a number of years ago! Highly recommended.

Avantages

The software itself is easy to use and easy to navigate. Due to its clean look and feel you cant really get lost. To change or update anything it is all clearly labelled and where as you may forget what order to do it in the customer service is first rate and their knowledge and helpfulness is second to none.

Inconvénients

I don't think there is anything not to like. I use other software programmes for HR and payroll and tI wish they were as easy to use as Award Force.

Avantages

The Award Force team provides basic training and awesome support that enables anyone to configure their product.

The product is very flexible. We are able to create and manage application forms and judging for four separate grant funding streams, with different deadlines.

It's accessible to applicants and judges anywhere, anytime, on any device.

Inconvénients

Our organization must comply with privacy laws for the protection of personal information. The storage of data on servers outside the country could be an issue.