Award Force

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

The team are insanely helpful and lovely. I spent years working in CS so I really appreciate good service!

Inconvénients

The ease of use could be better. There seem to be multiple places to edit the same content which is just weird. Overly complex in places.

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

Easy to set up and prompt support available in any timezone

Inconvénients

There can be some bugs to the system that prevent from making progress when setting up things.
The support that needs to be email than a zoom call. I had around 30 email exchanges with support this year which is not efficient on our side - Last year was much better, two zoom calls resolved my issues

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.

Avantages

We enjoy that the support team is global and that means quick responses on the wide variety of questions that we have on a rolling basis. We've never had a question go unanswered or unsolved. The platform is easy to use and customize for anyone seeking an events management platform.

Inconvénients

There are times where it would be nice to have a dedicated support person vs. a wider team, but it hasn't interrupted or kept us from developing the platform. It's just another way of working. The main events admin says that she would have liked to speak to someone vs. emailing. I suppose that goes along with the challenges of a global team. Email is easiest, but sometimes conversations can solve things in a different way.

Avantages

It might not be super easy to navigate through all the options but their customer service is always super quick and generally resolves my question first time. I wish all platforms had this level of service, and it's one of the main reasons why we have decided to renew for a second year.

Inconvénients

Not always super user friendly. Could be a bit easier to navigate.

Avantages

great overview for entries and easy to manage

Inconvénients

creating an account for every single award and limited search funktion

Avantages

System is easy to use and can be as simple or as complex as you like., The support team are highly responsive, knowledgable and lovely!

Inconvénients

Gets better all the time but I will look forward to being able to have multiple search criteria in the future hopefully!

Avantages

It's amazing! It looks great, the forward facing aspect has gotten many compliments. You can customize and tweak so much that you can make it work for almost anything! And the price is great! Customer service is very responsive and so helpful! They clearly know their stuff.

Inconvénients

-The built-in spreadsheet function is not great.
-You can't have a submission from an anonymous source or without requiring a login.
-If you want to have a lot of programs/ applications open at once, that tab view can get pretty cluttered and overwhelming. It would be nice if you could hide them by category or something.

Alternatives envisagées 

SurveyMonkey

Pourquoi choisir Award Force 

To get a better interface and improved functionality at less cost!

Pourquoi passer à Award Force

This had it all in terms of what we needed and looked great. I would definitely choose this again.

Avantages

The program is fairly intuitive so the learning curve is not too steep. And for the times when I have needed help, the response time and quality of support is unparalleled in my experience. I send an email, within a few hours no matter what time of the day or night I send it, someone from around the globe answers me. If further assistance is needed e.g. a call with someone, it can usually be set up within a day or two of my request.

And the quality of the support is excellent. The staff are extremely knowledgeable of the product and understand the questions from a user or functionality perspective vs providing technical-speak. It seems that often times tech support for other SW I have used is staffed by technical wonks who write the code and make the bells and whistles but don't have a real understanding of the business or user function so the support comes from that perspective rather than understanding what I am trying to do and then providing a solution.

Another thing that I use all the time is importing to excel to run reports. In this way, I can always have a user friendly aggregated view of what is on the platform depending on what I am needing. I love this ability to have offline access and I know some of our judges have also made good use of being able to download PDF versions of entries that they can review on the go and then come to the platform to enter their scores and comments.

Inconvénients

I have come across some small functionality that I would like to have such as a bit more ability to "pretty up" my email broadcasts or filtering by 2 different dimensions to randomly assign entries for judging. With that said, the SW really addresses so many of our main needs that these issues are not an issue and I have been able to create workarounds if needed.

Avantages

Everything!

Especially the rep our account tech support manager. she was on hand 24/7 with not just support, but with solutions, and confidence building techniques to help me take charge of the growth of our work.

The platform itself, is slick, very user friendly and a 100% reliable. It gave us the confidence we needed to launch our first annual HEAT awards. this has gone so well, we are already pencilling in next years campaign.

Award Force have been the first and only platform I have used for this task, but I wouldn't dream of going anywhere else.
In the grand scheme of things the cost was extremely good for all the benefits we obtained, and even though our event programme is over, we are still able use all the data for our analysis and personal development.

Inconvénients

In all honesty I have very little bad to say about the whole experience.

If you really pushed me for a balanced review, I would have to say that on a couple of times and considering I emailed support up to 4 times a day in the build up of our launch. that if our designated manager was out of the office or had finished for the day. The person that took over sometimes was a little enthusiastic to come back with a response and not grasp how slow I was being.

That's really nothing bad just maybe a pointer for the future that they get a summary of the clients habits and personal synopsis before responding to a query.

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

I love that is is easy for our members and judges to use. That ease of use helps with them participating in the awards program in subsequent years.

Inconvénients

Nothing major comes to mind, but I have a couple of minor dislikes. I wish there was better sorting capabilities on the screen views. Not all columns can be sorted. Also, some times our I need to provide reports to our board that the system doesn't provide. Luckily I can download everything into excel and create my own "ad hoc reports when needed.

Alternatives envisagées 

OpenWater

Pourquoi choisir Award Force 

Their product was buggy and difficult to use. The final straw was they raised our pricing more than 300% in one year (with no change in subscription offereings.)

Pourquoi passer à Award Force

Award Force is very intuitive and user friendly. It offered better scoring options, and methods for creating judging teams. Also, during our due diligence, we spoke with other AF users about their feedback from submitters and judges, and all raved about the feedback. We are now one of those ravers as well. Our members and judges love AF! So do we.

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

I run an awards program that gets more than 4,000 entries a year, and before we found Award Force we were allowing people to submit by just sending us a PDF. It was a huge effort to collect them all, a waste of paper to make a "packet" for judges to read, and a colossal pain to notify the winners and losers using a mail merge. Award Force is like a godsend in that regard -- it allows me to keep all the entries in one place, have the judges evaluate them right with in the system, and then I can notify winners and losers right from the system as well. The software allows me to program my questionnaire so submissions are automatically separated into the appropriate category, easily assign judges, and help users from the back end.

Inconvénients

The software can have a steep learning curve for new users (I onboard new judges all the time as we hire new people and it can be confusing at first). I wish some of the language was more intuitive. The system also sometimes can run slowly if I have a lot of tasks running at once on a big set of entries. And I think this is a problem on the end of my users (they work in places with very strong spam filters), but sometimes the notifications I send don't arrive where they're supposed to. I suspect they're getting caught in quarantine, but it causes some extra work for me on the back end having to look up individual submissions.

Avantages

For our Biennial of Slovenian Design we needed an intuitive and adjustable system. We were hoping to make administrative processes more efficient. After a detailed e-call, we were confident that we will be working with professionals who understand their clients. They translated the system in our language: it has only 2 mill. users, and has characteristics that are hard to work into english-based interfaces. While setting up, we were met with a lot of help from our producer. We encountered a problem: in the EU, it is required to add VAT info on invoice. AF did not have that option. After contacting them, VAT was implemented for us and other users also.
We are strict about our image, so the implementation of our visual identity was a must for us. Designers branded it the way they liked it. The base is clean and leaves enough room to make it your own. Our administrators were very happy with the experience, as it significantly lessened the workload and kept our costs down. Our users were very excited to use AF. We are confident that their efficient system brought in more entries than we expected. We are very much looking forward to working with them in the years ahead and would wholeheartedly recommend the system to anyone looking for solutions to dealing with user entries at any scale. We were very glad that our Biennial, which is quite small in comparison with their other clients, received a thoroughly professional and attentive approach from their excellent team.

Inconvénients

Some specific features didn't have a lot of flexibility but we managed to go around it with their help.

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

AwardForce is very easy to use and means we can send one link out to hundreds of judges to get the best quality judging we need. The support team are super useful and always reply in good time, there have been times where we need something done urgently and they are very quick to get back to us with a solution. It's easy to download data and keep a record of how we are doing year on year.

Inconvénients

It would be good if you could view more on the page at one time, for example filter some of the options when viewing entries like you can in excel but in the site.

Other than that I have no cons! :)

Avantages

The software can be customised to suite various award types as a result is versatile. It's certainly great for awards programs with multiple awards under different categories.
It is easy to use and modify even after set up. Good reporting capabilities and great dashboard.
Many options for judging of awards and can include different rounds as well. Good branding opportunities within the system, whether it be for your own awards program or your sponsors & partners.
From the research I have done this system is the best and is priced well.
The level of support available is great whether and you get to speak to a real person, from initial set and an ongoing basis. Many others don't offer this level of support.

Inconvénients

There really isn't anything I don;t like about it. It more than suits my needs.

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

The product is versatile and the support team is TOP!
Whenever I had a question (simple one or complex), the support team got back really fast and was very helpful and friendly. It's also great that we can request for short Zoom call to solve the problems. I find it very helpful and efficient, than to send numerous emails back and force.

Inconvénients

It takes some time to learn the system. There are so many features (which is good), but it also makes it harder to learn the functions. Now that I'm used to using the system, it's not a problem, but in the beginning the interface was a little confusing (e.g. you are able to access the judging from the judging menu and also settings > judging, only "one" form editor for all awards)

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

I like the fact that the layout of the content is organized and visually appealing. (concept tabs for example) Also, the dashboard, side panel with all the features, and checklists are helpful.

Inconvénients

The foreign DOB text box is not conducive to many of the US teams we work with. Also, I wish the videos were more directly accessible and embedded within the software so I was more likely to use it instead of constantly asking the team for support.

Avantages

The software is super easy to use and adapt to your program's needs. The help features and videos are best in class, and the customer service agents are patient and knowledgeable! Super fast turn around times too!

Inconvénients

I wish there was more data around my applicants and submissions and the Full Report by Nomination type could be refined more.

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 used a different program for three years for my association. It became harder to use each year. After helping two other associations on judging their awards, we got to work on Award Force and really loved it. So when our three year contract was done with the other program, we switched to Award Force.

We love how easy it is to work with and also how all of the content is arranged for the administrators.

We only started the process in 2020. We created our awards program, opened the awards and people started submitting their entries. Then COVID hit and we cancelled the awards. But up to that point, we did not have any problems.

Oh - and our other program did not have a shopping cart. For our members, this was a game changer.

Inconvénients

Nothing so far. We are just starting our second year with the program and did not get to the judging part last year due to COVID. But many of us have been on the judging side for other associations who also have Award Force and it was easy.

Avantages

Processes are relatively easy as is replicating seasons. Pulling reports is an absolute joy compared to asking the database the right questions as you do in RE and any queries or challenges you may face are quickly fixed by the team of consultants. They're happy to show you, teach you or do it for you. I also really like the ability to choose what you can see.

Inconvénients

It can be tricky at times like all software however, by working slowly through the problem and with the assistance of the consultants, the majority of challenges can be worked through

Avantages

Award Force is extremely user friendly, while also providing a robust and feature filled platform. The system walks you through every step of what you need to run your custom award program. The layout is clean and organized, while simultaneously ensuring that the functionality of the platform is not dumbed down. You will find it is very sophisticated and able to be highly customized for your organization's needs. For our organization, we loved the ability to customize the site to use our brand's assets, without needing to bring in an outside designer or developer.

Even better, the vast online guides and reference materials are awesome. They're a huge resource when you're onboarding Award Force for your organization. If you need any answers, they're just a minute away.

Inconvénients

I would like to see better sorting and better reporting. Our owner is a report fiend and sometimes we struggle with not being able to export exactly the reports we need for meetings and check ups. Overall not a huge problem, but something we would like to see addressed in the future.

Avantages

Customization of both the nomination process and judging. Allows you to really tailor the questions and judging process to your specific needs. I like that you can create different juding rounds as well to help narrow down finalists and winners when there are a lot of entries.

Inconvénients

Some learning curve to navigate the tool. For example I wanted to change the name of a certain field but instead of just editing the title I had to edit how that field displayed in the system. Would like a little more cusomtization on data merges as well where you can merge the name of the cateogry into a question for example vs creating duplicates of the same question with conditions. Also the text areas use markdown formatting which take a bit more time.

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

Very easy to set up and use! I am extremely pleased with Award Force on so many levels. As an awards administrator, it offers everything I need and more. Our users, both entrants and judges, have no complaints and are pleased with the platform.

Inconvénients

I really haven't had any bad experiences. I do wish I could mirror a users account to see exactly what they are seeing and currently that is not possible as far as I know. As an admin, when a user is having an issue or question, it would be nice to see exactly what they are seeing so I can problem solve. Award Force takes privacy and security of the users seriously, so I am thinking this is the reason why I cannot mirror a user.

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 is extremely well-designed. It is capable of handling multiple projects/programs at one time and it keeps all the information collected from applicants/entrants organized. The ability to export data to Excel is a great feature. The program is easy to use from all standpoints, including on the entrant side (usually students, in our case), judging side (usually faculty and administrators), and on the administrator side in setting up Award Force and manipulating it to suit our needs and events. Customer service is outstanding!! Seriously, top notch. The help videos are extremely useful, too.

Inconvénients

Truthfully, I do not have any complaints. We have been very pleased with Award Force and I would strongly recommend it to anyone.

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

1. Ease to implement and manage for administrators.
2. Ease of use for end users (contest entrants).
3. Great set of tools to set up and use the contest judging component.

Inconvénients

Just one thing. Wish the company could allow us to use our primary online payment vendor. We have an existing account for one that does work, but it'd be nice to consolidate and have just one product to deal with in terms of online payment. That said, Award Force has already listened to our concern and our request was forwarded on.

Alternatives envisagées 

OpenWater

Pourquoi choisir Award Force 

Value.

Pourquoi passer à Award Force

The combination of price and needed features.

Avantages

I appreciated the level of customization that was possible, which makes this product flexible for different needs and even changes mid-stream. Perhaps the most valuable was the highly responsive and friendly customer support team via email or phone, which I leaned on frequently.

Inconvénients

The in-app reporting views are limited, so I ended up exporting data to Excel to do certain kinds of sorting, filtering, and other data analysis. Also, the process of assigning judges was cumbersome in my case (instead of set judging groups, we assigned different combinations of judges to different applications - which was a multi-step process).

Avantages

Flexible for different needs, easy to use, professional look and feel.

Inconvénients

Not being able to run multiple programs at the same time - we would love to use it for our other Prize programs!

Avantages

I like the ability to have the history of my award easily in one place and to be able to quicky pull status updates on my entries and voters.

Inconvénients

Knowing where to start can be difficult, though there are helpful help forms.

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.

Avantages

The AwardForce platform is very intuitive and easy to use. The Tech Support is fantastic and I never fail to have questions or issued addressed very quickly. The one-on-one instruction is very much appreciated. It is easy for our entrants and judges to navigate.

Inconvénients

I had to get Tech Support to help me with connecting our billing platform. That was not quite as intuitive as the rest of the platform.

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

Award Force makes streamlining award programs much easier, from the submission, to managing the judges and communicating with users every step of the journey.
The platform is really easily customisable in terms of design and user experience, and enables multi-faceted award programs with multiple categories, which would just not be possible without having the software.

Inconvénients

I would love to be able to have a more customisable landing page for the program, which would avoid me having to develop another page/destination, instead of having a lot of the information around the categories/judges, etc. behind a login. These are often managed by other teams and can add complexity in the project, or even deter some users from entering.

Avantages

The ability of tag and sort your applications as they progress through multiple rounds of evaluation. The ability to set up multiple rounds, give needs based access based on who in the team is playing what kind of role - just to read, or evaluate or scoring by a jury member. And how that even looked differently for each user. The option to customise how our information shows up and some basic branding was also good to have.

Inconvénients

Tagging is one feature that could use more nuancing and we shared this with the Af team. A still more intutive interface would be good. Sometimes it takes a while to understand how to navigate what content blocks show up where etc. Front-end editing of this as much as possible would be great.

Avantages

I love who easy is to create and edit content. It has definitely helped us manage a very strong entry and judging process.
I also like the fast customer service, it has saved my life on several occasions! I also love the improvements they work on having every time!

Inconvénients

There is no many negative this to say, if I have to pick one will be the fact of a minor change they mad on the creation on the panels and I was not aware of so I had to do it one more time because the previous way of doing it it was obsolete. But at the end, the final result was better!

Avantages

Functionality - its intuitive once you get going to set up

Inconvénients

The ability for entrants to add a '£0' when we ask for financial figures - we need proper figures so have to check each entry for this.