Award Force Reviews

Pros
The program is fairly intuitive so the learning curve is not too steep. And for the times when I have needed help, the response time and quality of support is unparalleled in my experience. I send an email, within a few hours no matter what time of the day or night I send it, someone from around the globe answers me. If further assistance is needed e.g. a call with someone, it can usually be set up within a day or two of my request. And the quality of the support is excellent. The staff are extremely knowledgeable of the product and understand the questions from a user or functionality perspective vs providing technical-speak. It seems that often times tech support for other SW I have used is staffed by technical wonks who write the code and make the bells and whistles but don't have a real understanding of the business or user function so the support comes from that perspective rather than understanding what I am trying to do and then providing a solution. Another thing that I use all the time is importing to excel to run reports. In this way, I can always have a user friendly aggregated view of what is on the platform depending on what I am needing. I love this ability to have offline access and I know some of our judges have also made good use of being able to download PDF versions of entries that they can review on the go and then come to the platform to enter their scores and comments.

Cons
I have come across some small functionality that I would like to have such as a bit more ability to "pretty up" my email broadcasts or filtering by 2 different dimensions to randomly assign entries for judging. With that said, the SW really addresses so many of our main needs that these issues are not an issue and I have been able to create workarounds if needed.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
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.

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
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.

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Award Force is so easy to use, yet delivers a thoroughly comprehensive solution. The system is so clear, intuitive and logical it's an absolute pleasure to use. You can navigate your way around without ever getting lost or confused, everything is exactly where you'd expect to find it and you always feel completely in control. From the clean and clear layout you may initially be fooled into thinking it's not very sophisticated, but you'd be wrong. It delivers everything you need, and much much more, they've just worked very hard to make sure you don't have to. Whilst you have the ability to customise the site so you are able to reflect your brand and visual identity, you don't have to be a designer or web developer to understand it. I've never felt out of my depth configuring anything on Award Force and nothing has ever felt onerous, just simple and straightforward providing the result you were hoping for quickly and easily. The versatility of the system means I've never had to compromise and can have the exact set-up I want without it taking an age to change hundreds of settings, it just lets you choose exactly what you want then replicate it as many times as you wish. The extensive reference guides and online tutorials are an amazing resource, if you're unsure of anything you can have the answer within a few minutes - usually with a step by step guide!

Cons
I have to confess that I have struggled with this question, but the ability to sort by all of the fields within a view would be helpful. It would also be helpful to be able to configure bespoke reports for export, but it's not exactly a chore to have everything exported and then just choose to keep the ones you want. The things I've mentioned above may well be possible, I'm by no means an expert on every aspect of the system and I find new features and options every week!

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
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.

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Everything. Award Force is by far the best awards and judging platform I have used. Once you understand it and how the modules integrate with each other, it is ridiculously smooth and easy to use. Only the other day, I set up my next season. The longest part was inputting the name. Adding entries is quick and smooth. Modifying or cloning takes seconds. The judging platform is very comprehensive and the platform as a whole is designed with the end user in mind. It will be two years since we signed up to Award Force in January and we have no intention of changing. It has made my job easier and freed my time up to grow my role and support my team elsewhere. Moreover, our entrants and judges regularly compliment us on choosing Award Force. It's a great system. Thoroughly recommended. I could go on but no need to. It's that good...... The support is wonderful and everybody at Award Force is knowledgable, responsive, professional, very timely, and friendly. A pleasure to work with...

Cons
Can't think of anything....the only two tiny little things: 1. The PDF headers can be a bit overwhelming (it would be nice if we could resize them) 2. Could do with extending the broadcast facility a bit so that you can filter who you send messages to more But I stress these are tiny little issues that do not actually affect my work

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
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.

Cons
There really isn't anything I don;t like about it. It more than suits my needs.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
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.

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

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Award Force easily has the best customer support I have experienced with a product. They were timely in returning my calls and emails, and were extremely helpful in helping me customise the product for my organisational needs. Having been new to the software this year, I was able to be quickly become confident in my use of the product. The platform had zero technical issues even upon launch. I had no reports of any difficulties of users logging on or submitting entries. The reports generated from the entries were very fast and provided a high level of detail which I was able to analyse for my organisational requirements.

Cons
At times it was a bit difficult to locate the appropriate field when trying to make a change/text edit to the platform. This is when I would contact support and they were able to identify where I could make the change. Other than that, the other improvements identified were less about the system itself and more about how we could customise it next year to better suit our organisational needs - e.g. extra fields.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Having previously run our annual awards program via submission of hard copy entries from entrants in 2017 we moved to use Award Force software - allowing us to build a custom online platform via which entrants could submit their entry portfolios, and we could easily manage the process from the back end/administrative end of the entry portal. A seamless operation - and very easy to use - allowing us to monitor rate of entry, auto respond to entrants, and obviously the great benefit of being able to digitally store a huge amount of data/info instead of our previous headache of having excessive paper copies. The software has been exceptional value for money. Award Force provided excellent upfront training in how best to use the software and also provided an excellent back up service for any small glitches that might arise in initial use. All in all it has been a fantastic purchase for our organisation and one which we wish we had probably made a number of years ago! Highly recommended.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
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

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
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.

Cons
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! :)

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Flexible for different needs, easy to use, professional look and feel.

Cons
Not being able to run multiple programs at the same time - we would love to use it for our other Prize programs!

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Everything

Cons
There are no cons. I like everything. Nothing to complain about whatsoever.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
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.

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Pros
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.

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Its user friendly interface makes it very easy to set up a session and manage the entries to you awards. I like that the information from the previous years can be reused, making it even more easy to use years after years. The information displayed on the dashboard are really useful. You can keep track of how many entries you've got at the moment, how many have already been submitted and how many are still in progress. The graph displaying how many entries have been created over the last few days also helps us analyse our impact. For example we can see whether the last email we've sent to promote the awards has generated new entries. We send I also love the broadcasting feature, which makes it so easy to contact all the entrants at once. Bye bye mailmerge emails, hello simplicity!

Cons
Setting up the criteria for each categories has been my least favorite part of the set up. It's still rather user friendly, and I'm not sure whether you could make this step easier, but I found it quite tideous. The data analysis features could be better too. For example we wanted to compare the amount of entries created/submitted in the 2016-17 session and the 2017-18 session but were unable to do so.

Rating breakdown

Pros
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.

Cons
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

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
The ease of uploading projects to the site was a huge time saver. Allowing the jury to use the site to vote and rank projects to allow me to see the shortlisted projects was fantastic. The jury also enjoyed using the site and ease of the interface.

Cons
I was overwhelmed when setting up our small program on the site. There were so many options and choices that I wasn't clear on how to get what we wanted. It was frustrating that I couldn't use phone support because we purchased the smaller package. I did use the tech support online but I didn't always have time to wait hours for a response. I struggled to figure out how to move entries to the shortlist round, and award the winners in multiple categories. We wanted to share the program in a public view with all of our staff so they could see the projects that were submitted, but I could not figure out how to do that. I was able to make all the winners public viewing, but not all projects. In the end, I gave up on a public view and was very frustrated. I followed the instructions in the help box, but still couldn't get the projects to show up. Being able to pick up the phone and have someone talk me through it would have been helpful. For the amount of money we paid I was annoyed that I couldn't share the site with our staff.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
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.

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

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
I can honestly say it has been an excellent experience, particularly when configuring the system - very straight forward and intuitive. Our session requirements have meant that some of the judging specifications needed to be multi-level, thanks to our fully supportive and amazingly helpful Awards Producer, the judging rounds have been a breeze. One particular totally invaluable feature is having full access to archived sessions and submissions coupled with feeling confident that they are totally secure.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
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!

Cons
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!

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
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.

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

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

Cons
- 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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10