Award Force

Money, time and resources well spent!

주석: Using a designated and bespoke product like AF, has taken out so much stress and uncertainty around getting the nominations in and judged remotely. we had over 1000 entries that needed to go through a very clear and strict judging process (in light of being fare and transparent ) We could let judging take place remotely and smoothly, with the confidence of our data security and personal reputational image being protected.

장점:

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.

단점:

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.

Amazing and professional, with great support team.

주석: More entries than expected and we saved a lot of administrative fees. Their support team is very helpful and fast in responding, which was a big plus for us.

장점:

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.

단점:

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

Great Program!

장점:

This program is very nice to have. Worth the money.

단점:

It takes some time to catch on to this program.

AwardForce for MadeForMums and Junior Magazine

주석: AwardForce has saved us a lot of time and means we can manage everything to with awards in one site. It's easy to pass on logon details to external judges who may be judging from afar and makes everyone feel as if they are on an important panel even being miles away.

장점:

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.

단점:

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! :)

Best customer service... maybe ever?!

주석: It's good but it could be better. The terminology isn't as straightforward as it could be. It would be great if there could be a website widget for nominations just to make life easier for nominators. (I manage the website)

장점:

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

단점:

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.

Having used Raisers Edge I found changing over to AF so much easier and more intuitive to use.

주석: I can bring all my information together and export to Excel. I have the opportunity to learn as I go or with a consultants assistance and the software is very responsive to my particular award needs.

장점:

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.

단점:

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

The perfect software for running custom awards!

주석: Our old system for managing online entries and giveaways was clunky and timeconsuming. We knew it was a weak area for our marketing efforts but were unsure of the right way to implement a solution. One of our teammembers found Award Force and we implemented it almost immediately. It's streamlined our efforts so much and allowed us to run giveaways much more efficiently!

장점:

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.

단점:

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.

Useful tool for project applications

주석: Good overall but too many bugs this year (started in Sept. 2023) compared to 2022

장점:

Easy to set up and prompt support available in any timezone

단점:

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

Customer Service is spot on

장점:

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.

단점:

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

Makes streamlining award programs easier

주석: Dealing with Award Force has always been pretty straightforward and positive. Everyone I have spoken to has been very helpful and supportive, and is a testament to a good company culture.

장점:

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.

단점:

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.

Award Force is incredible- easy to use and very easy to customize for our Award program requirements

주석: -Ease of use
-Highly accessible with information that is always available - whether on a desktop, lapto, tablet or mobile device
-Eliminates virtually all manual paper work that our previous system required
- Easy to contact all users or subsets of users via email using the Broadcast Message feature, which was something that previously we had to do using email and determining who we needed to contact

장점:

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.

단점:

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.

Award Force helped our program become completely digital. The entire process worked so well.

주석: Ease of time on the administrators end. Ease of use and uploading ability to make all things electronic on the users end. Wrap up after the award process was so simple! That was the best part. Even though there is a cost that we didn't have before, our organization found that the benefits outweighed the costs. We needed to be all electronic and needed to alleviate the time component from the administrators, who are all volunteers. This program did that for us.

장점:

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.

단점:

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.

Application for Best Scientific Image Contest

주석: AwardForce fits very well with the requirements we have in the competition for the best scientific image. The price is not low, but it has paid off because of the very good support and the great variety of features.

장점:

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.

단점:

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).

Loving this program!

주석: It is easy to use. The help articles and videos are also really good.

장점:

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.

단점:

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.

Award Force makes it easy to create online application forms and judge the submissions.

장점:

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.

단점:

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.

A Little Tricky But Excellent and Fast Support

주석: I'm glad we have one awards season under our belts because it will be so much better next year with the platform up and running. Overall, I would use it again.

장점:

For the price, my chapter was able to purchase, set up and administer a decent awards program. It is highly customizable down to the most minute feature. It looks and feels professional and well thought out. This same platform is used throughout the US so many judges/entrants have already interfaced with it.

단점:

Because it is so customizable, it is like a maze. At times I felt like there was so much to know that there was no way I'd ever learn the platform. Luckily, customer service was ALWAYS there. When I say always, I mean morning, evening, night -- even though they were a half a world away. Super helpful, friendly, patient folks. My needs were plenty and they were always there for me. Can't say enough about them. Honestly, most of the reason I needed help was that I was busy with a new job and didn't have the time to devote to teaching myself how to use the program.

We used Award Force to run several design competitions successfully

주석: Ease of use, professionally run design competitions and peace of mind.

장점:

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.

단점:

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

A Program Manager's DREAM!

주석: Award Force has completely revolutionized the submission, review, and dissemination process for several of the programs administered through our office (Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at Middle Tennessee State University). We are currently using it for student grant proposals submissions and abstract submissions for events such Scholars Week, Posters at the Capitol, and several conferences. It truly is a program manager's dream software.

장점:

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.

단점:

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

Award Force Review

주석: Great! Very supportive, efficient and helpful customers service experience with all the Award Force team, coupled with an easy user experience and set-up process.

장점:

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

단점:

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'

The whole process was simple and straightforward

주석: An online system has saved literally hundreds of man hours from processing hard copy entries. The ease of reporting is critical and payments on line makes the accounting and administration so much easier. The software has fitted well into our other main systems

장점:

The software is very simple which makes it easy to understand, easy to use and easy to manage, The system is very cost effective.

단점:

Because of the simplicity of the system there are some functions which may be included on a more complex system. However constant work is being done by Award Force and we are now in our second year and see a lot more functions in place over time

Award Force's Review

장점:

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.

단점:

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!

Gov Awards

주석: Love Award Force! It's really improved our office efficiency. We used to have to manually collate all information from nominees (over 130 with this program) which was messy and left room for error. We also had to then save all nominations and upload forms and supporting documents to an online share portal for judges to review ( very very time consuming and also fraught with error!) Award Force has removed all of that :)
The only thing I'd like to change is how you can communicate with people (nominees and judges) through the program. I don't want to send information to every nominee or judge, just a select few.
We also have face-to-face meetings for our judges and we tried to use Award Force to re-score during these meetings, while it was possible it wasn't an ideal means of judging. It would be better if the manager could take over one main scoreboard and add judges scores on their behalf as they call them out (rather than each judge scoring each nomination again and again and waiting for the updated score).

장점:

It's reduced our manual data entry process and made it easier for judges to review from anywhere at any time.

단점:

Creating the tabs and each individual criteria field - for our particular awards program, this was very lengthy!!

Great platform, easy to use, amazing support!

주석: Everyone i have worked with at Award Force has been a delight! We had been using the same system for a long time and made the much needed change to Award Force, we are going into year two with the platform because it was so great!

장점:

It works well and is visually appealing.

단점:

I wish there was a way to close a round for entries but have a secret way to allow ppl to still edit their entry.

Best Award Platform out there and more

주석: AwardForce is an incredible platform that is relatively easy to use and can be extremely customizable once you get the hang of things. Where there is a learning curve, the incredible support team does not just solve the problem for you but teaches you along the way so that you can become independent and more confident with the platform. Some of the judges using this platform were C-Suite at fortune 500 companies and all commended us on the seamless process. We also worked with a lot of startups and emerging tech companies in the judging and applicant pool and they all had positive feedback about the UX and UI. No matter what size contest or applicant pool you are working with, AwardForce allows you to go above and beyond in terms of features and accommodation and communication with users. It gave our team confidence managing a process with high-level executive judges and users who are some of the biggest names in the tech industry.

장점:

- Customizability - UX/UI - Support Team - Managing Features

단점:

- If you want a highly, highly complex setup, it does get complicated. However, the support team has your back and allows you to learn as you go. Eventually, you feel like an expert.

Award Force - my review after 1 month of using

주석: AF helps us with the process of application and judging of 9 different awards (individual and big companies can apply). There is a lot of data to collect. Until now we did it all via e-mails. It was a big mess. Award Force put it all in one place so it gives us more time and less work to manage it.

장점:

I was a bit affraid before implementing this tool because we have many different awards, each of them with other criteria but from the beggining we had big support - with a lot of tutorials on the website and especially with the customer service. What I like most is the big range of possibilities and its versatility. However your award system is complicated, you will find a solution in implementing it in Award Force. I also like the main menu. It is very useful and easy to use.

단점:

What I don't like is the button "configuration mode ON/OFF". It should be on the botton of the page also not only on the top. It is the only thing that comes to my mind.