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 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 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 that entrants can create and submit their entries and the ease that we can track their progress and monitor incoming revenue.

Inconvénients

From time to time we do pick up on small errors or system glitches that interfere with live judging sessions - this tends to be related to 'system maintenance'

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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.

Avantages

Entrants can upload data, pictures, etc and we can then easily download it for the production of our books. Before, award entrants have sent in their material per post - it was a mess. Much less complicated now.

Inconvénients

The set-up can be a bit complicated but once you've gotten the hang of it, not such a big problem.

An app would be really cool!

Avantages

- user-friendly
- You can archive past data
- You can export anything according to your needs
-The support team is very accommodating and very responsive.

Inconvénients

-its quite costly - you get what you pay for, in a positive way.
- I cant think of any cons because whenever I encounter problems, the team responds and resolves it.

Avantages

Awards Force makes running awards so much easier. Our entrants and judges all report that it is a great tool to use. When we started using Awards Force entries surged 30%, and they have grown every year since. Our judges have found their workload reduced, and (most importantly) it has become so much easier to manage. What used to take two weeks is now down to days, and the level of control and information I can access as an organiser is transformational. It is not overstating it to say that Awards Force has changed my life.

Avantages

Relatively easy to use and makes the awards management quicker

Inconvénients

1. not possible to search for duplicates in different categories
2. No possibility to open attachments from PDFd entries

Avantages

Awardforce lets us run an internal program that lets all our offices globally submit work for judging.

This happens every 2-3 months and we can then publish the work into galleries for all to see (separated into the top scorers and all other work).

Being able to lock down registration to specific domains means that we can keep it strictly within our company, but allows us the versatility to add external people if and when necessary.

The process is relatively simple (once you've gained an understanding of how the system works) and I have always found that help is readily available when needed, with the team being quick to respond, and offering solutions to any problems we encounter or requests that we have.

Inconvénients

It isn't particularly intuitive, and if not used on a regular basis it can be easy to get a little lost when trying find specific functionality. That said, we do use the platform ina different way than most other companies so it is partly because of that.

Avantages

AwardsForce is very user friendly and easy to navigate. We have a complicated awards system and AwardsForce is one of the few softwares which met all our main requirements.

Inconvénients

Payment options - would be great to have several bank accounts within one user account (instead of just one)