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

Une plateforme bien conçue et simple d'utilisation.
Un service support très réactif, patient et à l'écoute.
Les utilisateurs (jurys et candidats) n'ont pas manqué de nous exprimer leur satisfaction (parcours de candidature intuitif, intérêt pour les jurys de noter des candidatures avec des fiches normalisées, de pouvoir consulter l'avis des autres jurys...)
Nous n’avons probablement pas exploité l’outil au maximum de ses capacités, mais nous nous améliorerons la prochaine fois!

Inconvénients

Difficulté pour envoyer des mails à seulement certaines personnes d'une catégorie (sans les faire un par un)
Lors des création des membres du jurys, nous leur avons envoyé un mail avec un lien pour réinitialiser leur mot de passe et accéder à leurs candidatures à noter : beaucoup revenaient vers nous pour nous dire qu'ils ne connaissaient pas leur mot de passe et ne comprenaient pas pourquoi ils devaient le réinitialiser alors qu'ils n'avaient rien créé.
Plusieurs aussi s'étaient déjà créé un compte candidat avant de recevoir l'invitation, donc ne retrouvaient pas les candidatures qu'ils devaient noter.

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 structure, the analysis report, export the data I received. allow the attachment for people submission

Inconvénients

there are some bugs happened in last couple of days when I open my nomination process to large audience.

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

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 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

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

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

great overview for entries and easy to manage

Inconvénients

creating an account for every single award and limited search funktion

Avantages

Customer service is responsive, friendly and helpful

Inconvénients

I don't find it to be intuitive or easy to use

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

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 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

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

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

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

My team used Award Force for an awards program, and it was great. I found the Award Force site easy to operate once you are guided how and the support partners set up time for as many orientation sessions as I required and were timely in replying to any issues. Ease of use The ability to personalize site with our branding Prompt and professional support

Inconvénients

I do find it frustrating that specific features are not present in the software. Like not having a report of notifications, being able to copy anyone into notifications, to contact collaborators in an application, not being able to use the fields in all areas of the application. The review flow is quite challenging to set up and impossible to visualize quickly, it would be nice to have a way of merely imagining which applications are where Also setting up judging is a bit tricky too, and it is hard to see if it has been set up accurately. I would also like to get a general update on what you have designed regarding feature updates. I have also previously sent some feature ideas to the support team. It would be nice to see some of these administered.

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

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'