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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People working on the plateforme are really professionnal

Inconvénients

I would like to make a REX (Return on experience) meeting with people involved.

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

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

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

The representatives are available 24/7 all over the world to solve problems and propose solutions.

Inconvénients

The emails from AF often go to someone's SPAM folders and we have to keep tracking them down.

Avantages

In a busy clinical health setting, we needed a product easy to use for our health staff to apply for annual pitch competition and simple enough to program in the back end for us as management staff. This is the product for you!

Inconvénients

I do find setting up the judging rounds and panels challenging and always need extra help. But over the years these processes are improving and I am learning more.

Avantages

The Award Force management and support teams were incredibly helpful during our entire selection process, set up phase and implementation. There was always someone available for answers, no matter that we are located in the US and their main office is in Australia.

From our initial conversations as far as what was on our "must have" list and our "nice to have" list of features, AF was able to make a few small customizations to their program to give us 100% of the items on our "must have" list and 95% on our "nice to have" list of items.

They appear to constantly have the customer as their #1 focus and even after we launched came back to us with an idea to use something in their existing platform in order to offer us a small work around to give us something that was on our "nice to have list" that would help our judging community.

We've had nothing but positive reviews from our client base - from our entrants, to our judges and even our accountant who compiles the entrant scores.

The system is incredibly secure, with various different user profiles that only gives them the access they require. Award Force even created two new user roles specifically for us based on our award program requirements and what our users needed to have access to in the system.

I can't praise our implementation manager and the entire AF support team more as they were always available and never made it seem like even my dumbest question wasn't something they took seriously.

Inconvénients

There is very little that I don't like about Award Force. But if I had to pick one: since the system is used by multiple award program clients around the world there are a few small areas that don't quite give us exactly what we need and that weren't able to be changed for us. However, these are just a few small items and through conversations with our AF implementation manager we devised ways to get what we needed through small work arounds that didn't add any more time or effort to what we had done previously for these items. So in the end, even though there were a few small "cons" in AF, the amount of time that we save using Award Force verses what we used before, along with the amount of information that is now available to us where it wasn't before, far outweigh the small amount of cons in the system.

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

Its user friendly interface makes it very easy to set up a session and manage the entries to you awards. I like that the information from the previous years can be reused, making it even more easy to use years after years. The information displayed on the dashboard are really useful. You can keep track of how many entries you've got at the moment, how many have already been submitted and how many are still in progress. The graph displaying how many entries have been created over the last few days also helps us analyse our impact. For example we can see whether the last email we've sent to promote the awards has generated new entries. We send I also love the broadcasting feature, which makes it so easy to contact all the entrants at once. Bye bye mailmerge emails, hello simplicity!

Inconvénients

Setting up the criteria for each categories has been my least favorite part of the set up. It's still rather user friendly, and I'm not sure whether you could make this step easier, but I found it quite tideous. The data analysis features could be better too. For example we wanted to compare the amount of entries created/submitted in the 2016-17 session and the 2017-18 session but were unable to do so.

Avantages

Award Force easily has the best customer support I have experienced with a product. They were timely in returning my calls and emails, and were extremely helpful in helping me customise the product for my organisational needs. Having been new to the software this year, I was able to be quickly become confident in my use of the product.

The platform had zero technical issues even upon launch. I had no reports of any difficulties of users logging on or submitting entries.

The reports generated from the entries were very fast and provided a high level of detail which I was able to analyse for my organisational requirements.

Inconvénients

At times it was a bit difficult to locate the appropriate field when trying to make a change/text edit to the platform. This is when I would contact support and they were able to identify where I could make the change.

Other than that, the other improvements identified were less about the system itself and more about how we could customise it next year to better suit our organisational needs - e.g. extra fields.

Avantages

The ability to customize where needed, the availability of options and the design, look and feel of the site is a lot more modern from the front end user perspective than others we have used.

Inconvénients

Would love if there was the option to edit application within the site to make them anonymous. Our users enter information within their applications that sometimes require us to have to manually block out information - for example, school transcripts with photos and address information. It is more of a function of our application requirements but for us it has been something that is never easy to do.

Avantages

Everything

Inconvénients

There are no cons. I like everything. Nothing to complain about whatsoever.

Avantages

I can honestly say it has been an excellent experience, particularly when configuring the system - very straight forward and intuitive. Our session requirements have meant that some of the judging specifications needed to be multi-level, thanks to our fully supportive and amazingly helpful Awards Producer, the judging rounds have been a breeze. One particular totally invaluable feature is having full access to archived sessions and submissions coupled with feeling confident that they are totally secure.

Avantages

Easy to navigate, inclusion of sponsor logos, graphics, broadcast email function a good tool, content blocks easy to populate- taking us to the next level as Award Force continue to invest in delivering sophisticated functionality.

Inconvénients

Having to sequentially number the tabs and fields as you have to re-do them if you miss too many when populating.

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

We have access to an extraordinary expert user when we run into trouble. Having a trusted consultant like Cil, means that I can work on a new platform confident that I have her to turn to when I hit difficulties that I can't trouble shoot myself.

Inconvénients

It is a complex program for a new user. I am only two weeks into working with it and trying to run multiple awards. It is a little tricky to learn. I do not necessarily find it intuitive but the more I work with it the more it makes sense to me.

Avantages

While introducing I begin your review with a brief introduction to Award Force, mentioning its purpose and significance in awards management. You can also include any context about how you came across the software. Discuss the user-friendliness of the software. Mention if the interface is intuitive and if it's easy for both administrators and applicants to navigate.: Absolutely it is intuitive and easy to navigate. Features and Functionality:Detail the key features of Award Force that you found valuable. This could include aspects like customizable application forms, scoring systems, reporting capabilities, or any unique features that set it apart. All are very good and excellent I found.

Inconvénients

There are certain things of course to be improved. Like reporting part, I could not find any easy way to get the scoring sheet and scores together to be converted to a pdf format.