What platforms are people using to run the application process for their awards programs? For reference, we use typeform and that has worked well enough over the first two years of the Golden Grots. But in the name of evolution, I wanted to see what else was out there before we launch year 3.
well you see this is why i said you have some good knowledge. Knowing what not to use is just as valuable as knowing what to use.
This awards microsite was insanely expensive to custom build but it had the live streaming of the awards show, application process, analytics and judging scorecard all on it. If you need something light weight, the CAP awards used jotform and it was pretty smooth from a judging standpoint when I went through it this year
We have been using Google Forms. It does the job, but it's super basic and it's not ideal since it puts all the responses into a spreadsheet, so I can't say I recommend it
We used Google Forms this year and it was okay. I’m more interested in what the evaluation process is like for you all. We established a simple rubric that aligned with the selection criteria and then had to divvy up the hundreds of submissions across a cross-functional group to assess. We then determined a shortlist and had a smaller panel select winners from that. But would love to hear how you’re doing it!
Sorry for the delay in responding in thread! Here's what I've worked with:
I currently use Award Force to support a client's awards program. They've used it for ~5 years. The setup is truly not intuitive and I wasn't supporting the account in the first year it was configured. We then have since "replicated" seasons for each year and made minor adjustments. I would not want to be responsible for the original configuration because even just making minor adjustments is truly so difficult and unintuitive. We have had some challenges over the last few years with their support model, but nothing out of this world remarkable. Unfortunately, this year we had a massive problem: they deleted/deactivated our active awards site/season in the midst of our application period. There was no explanation for why this occurred and we were passed to a number of CSMs before it was rectified. We were down for ~2 days. When they reinstated our site, they were not able to reinstate the archive from previous seasons and they were also not able to put the attachments back for customers who had already submitted and included optional attachments. We were refunded for our trouble and their mistake, but that was likely the final nail in the coffin.
I've personally evaluated both Evalato and Openwater, but I haven't looked at either recently and wasn't impressed enough to consider recommending a transition from Award Force (which was working at the time). Obviously things have changed now! I anticipate we'll be doing a full platform evaluation in the coming few months.
Another option that is on the market but I haven't yet reviewed is Submittable.
For another client, we work in their own form building tool. We do a lot of exporting and manipulating data outside of the form. I personally find this to be an inefficient process as we burn a lot of time manipulating data so it is easily readable. We also pull this data out of Excel and into Word to create individual docs for each judge to review. If you have a big awards program and a big CMA team that can support data manipulation, this might be a worthwhile route for you.
I haven't found anything that plugs into Salesforce or an Advocacy Database/Management tool—which would be ideal as there is often an issue, regardless of what platform you're using, in matching the customer name submitted to what lives in Salesforce.
Happy to send updates as we begin the vendor evaluation process though!
