Award Force

Avantages

The software saves us time and energy by storing the material, categorising it, and allowing entrants to manage the submission themselves until close of entries. Even then, entrants are permitted to resubmit incomplete content if necessary, which saves us a lot of filing.

Centralised storage that is backed up and accessible to anyone (with permissions) is a relief.

We're pleased when entrants give us feedback that they find the process simple & intuitive.

It's very convenient for the administrators to be able to export customisable reports. I could go on and on...

Inconvénients

We haven't got around to asking the helpdesk about this feature yet (perhaps it already exists), but we can see some benefit in providing the capacity for an entry to be able to be a "linked copy" of the primary entry. Rather than making a full duplicate of an entry simply to enter into a different category. It would be useful if all the common content was linked between each instance, and there was the capacity to provide additional content specific to the linked category(s) if required.

I don't think this functionality exists currently, but if it doesn't I wouldn't be surprised if they are working on it already.

Avantages

The ease of uploading projects to the site was a huge time saver. Allowing the jury to use the site to vote and rank projects to allow me to see the shortlisted projects was fantastic. The jury also enjoyed using the site and ease of the interface.

Inconvénients

I was overwhelmed when setting up our small program on the site. There were so many options and choices that I wasn't clear on how to get what we wanted. It was frustrating that I couldn't use phone support because we purchased the smaller package. I did use the tech support online but I didn't always have time to wait hours for a response. I struggled to figure out how to move entries to the shortlist round, and award the winners in multiple categories. We wanted to share the program in a public view with all of our staff so they could see the projects that were submitted, but I could not figure out how to do that. I was able to make all the winners public viewing, but not all projects. In the end, I gave up on a public view and was very frustrated. I followed the instructions in the help box, but still couldn't get the projects to show up. Being able to pick up the phone and have someone talk me through it would have been helpful. For the amount of money we paid I was annoyed that I couldn't share the site with our staff.

Avantages

Ease of use. Award Force has allowed us to run design competitions with up to 70 entrants relatively easily. Award Force took so much of the onerous sifting through entries and made it so much easier for us as the organizers of the competitions and for the judges to access and review the entries. It also helped when we ran design competitions with several rounds, i.e. Round One being the initial selection of acceptable entries being put into a coherent set of entries and then allowing the judges to easily go through them in order to populate Round Two. The whole experience has been very easy and that is extremely helpful to us as we don't have the time to develop our own system.

Inconvénients

Can be a little bit difficult to look back at previous rounds of a design competition as the competition progresses, i.e. when at Round 2 of the competition and you want to look back at how the entrants earlier work looked it takes some time to navigate and find what you want

Avantages

Clean, easy to follow interface, easy for entrants and judges to use.

Inconvénients

It can be difficult to track where you are up to with fields etc.