Award Force Reviews

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.

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.

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

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

The ease of use. At first there appears to be a lot to input and learn but the support you get, including hands on webinars and individual training makes it simple. The support team are very responsive. And the degree of functionality is great. We had a paper based system previously which was an absolute nightmare - printing, distributing, collating, reprinting for judges...and so on. Now it's a simple process and judging is online, so it can be done at any time anywhere.

The is really nothing that I don't like about this software. Some of the things, such as setting up your theme take a bit of work, but a little reading and experimenting overcomes this.

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.

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.

It works well and is visually appealing.

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.

Aww thanks Emma! You've been a delight to work with too :D We've released a 'resubmission' feature recently which might work for you. We'll be in touch today to tell you about it.

When you select the help menu, it suggests customized topics depending on what screen you're on Ability to customize most fields Merge multiple submissions

A little hard to navigate at first Some things are not customizable

When selecting AwardForce, we ran a full search looking at many different platforms. Only Awardforce offered us the flexibility and control over our own competition. The Team are fantastic, the costs are completely transparent and it's brilliantly secure. There's also new features being delivered regularly. My client absolutely loves it and it's completely revolutionised the whole competition process.

It would be nice to have more control over the Judging views in terms of layout. At the moment this is fixed.

The software provided everything you need as an Awards Coordinator, in a clean designed view: Setting up the rules and categories for your Awards, the customised design, payments, the judging, a nice dashboard to have real-time impressions and the different possibilities to collect data. It´s a very sophisticated system; I would recommend it to whoever is working with awards and competitions.

Some tools were very easy to handle, but at first I could not understand them. Thanks to the support of AwardForce team, that was not a real issue, as they immediately came back with a solution.

The customer service was excellent. They were always helpful in nutting out solutions for our complicated review flows and finding work-arounds if necessary.

Can't tailor the reports (downloads) to suit our requirements Need to be able to copy the review flow over to the next season

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.

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.

The greatest pro is community and people working to keep the software up-to-date and answer questions you have around the product. It's hard to know everything about a new software, so having a great support team is crucial.

I don't feel like I missed anything when buying the software. Perhaps some features are missing, but that can be easily fixed by upgrading your subscription.

While the Awardforce program is not the most intuitive program in my opinion, your customer service team is wonderful! It is so reassuring that I can jump into the calendar and schedule time with [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] and have other customer service personnel who are accessible. While I sometimes struggle explaining my questions, your team always seems to understand what I'm asking. I appreciate and value everything your team offers. Thank you!

I do stumble around trying to navigate the system. It's hard for me to find what I'm looking for without asking for help!

Thank you for your kind words, Aimee! Our support team is celebrating today - with a special mention to Megan! We hear you on the system being a little hard to use and we are working hard on making it simpler. The new year will bring some big improvements :)

Easy of use, personally maintained but with back up when required. Ability to check progress, email from within via broadcasts to entrants, financial capability to accept payment and send invoices saves time. Once we had worked the platform once we definitely got the hang of it quick as did our entrants and judges.

In the criteria area when info is written, the system automatically defaults to spell check with pink boxes and often not necessary. this can be off putting to entrants and we have received a number of queries on this as to how to not have it showing but the system cannot change this. Points system does not work well for us and we still have to export ranking and then mannually add up to find winners based on preference from our judges

Relatively easy to use and makes the awards management quicker

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

Thank you for your kind words, Sylwia! We have recently introduced a new feature to be able to identify and manage duplicate entries. We'll contact you today and tell you all about it. We'll address the PDF point too :) Thanks again for your positive review!

Entrants can easily upload and view their entries and edit when needed. Flexible and adaptive forms to collect data/uploads and the forms are very clear and easy to add a lot of descriptive text to help inform entrants. Very easy to monitor entries and payments etc. Managers can easily access entries and make amendments when needed on behalf of entrants. The support is amazing - help is always on hand when there are any questions or issues you need help with.

The software is not overly intuitive when initially setting up, but the high-level of support provided helps with this. Can't be modified/developed for specific needs (unless requested by multiple users - due to nature of the system). However, they do help you with workarounds and develop new features when they can.

We were manually collecting/managing awards before award force - so award force was incredibly welcomed. The product is perfect for what we need it for, its simple to use for us who are managing it, the users using it and also for the judges. I would highly recommend this product especially as the customer service is better than anything I have ever experienced.

Would be good to have a user view in the back end when you sign in - just so you can keep track on what the users are seeing along with managing the back end of everything

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.

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.

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.

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.

Customer support: Carl has been such a great trainer and support--going above and beyond to help us understand and make changes to our events. He helped copy fields and change order numbers on our screenshare call to make our event better. Megan has been super helpful too--responding promptly. It is easy to use! Everything is pretty straight forward--if it's labeled something it has that functionality. It looks nice to viewers. Clean and nice layout. Its dynamic--there is a wide range of functionality--to create conditional fields, to hide fields from judges, types of attachments, types of judging, ect.

There are some hidden tricks you'd only know about if you were screensharing with an award force rep--for example the ## make the heading size different.

Very responsive support, great features and easy to implement and maintain.

Often not very descriptive labels in the application.

All the functionalities I needed were built into the software. There was no feature our project needed that wasn't available with this product.

I didn't experience any cons while using Awards Force!

It intuitive after a while it become second nature and its fun watching it all come together. I am not at all techy but I had no issues with the software and it looks very straightforward for our applicants.

At the moment I don't have any complaints. We don't have a graphic designing so scaling the logos to the correct size took a little bit of time but nothing major. I have not yet configured the judging component so I just hope that is as straight foreword as setting up the applications. I think it was quite expensive too. Many from the point of view that I work in a department where there are multiple program and to pay this much for every program would not be possible, which is a shame as all the programs would benefit from it.

The adaptability to customer's needs. Since we started using this programme back in April, we flagged some changes that we wanted to implement to make it easier for our entrants and judges and most of them where already implemented by the Award Force team.

There are still some features/functions that need to be changed and some missing to make it a seamless experience for the administrators, entrants and judges alike.

Allows me to do what I need to for work. Allows candidates to fill in applications really easily and the entire process is easy to monitor.

The terminology and interface takes some getting used to. It's not as intuitive as I had hoped. Although help and customer service has been excellent and once one gets used to it, the features are very useful.

User friendly, well though out, always being updated, responds quickly to changes made

No cons were added to this review