From chaos to calm: how AwardStage can lighten the load
Awards are joyous things, designed to recognise our achievements and celebrate our success. But when you’re nervous about entry numbers, scouting for sponsors and trying to keep busy judges happy, it can all seem just a little bit, well, stressful.
Over the years, we’ve chatted to a lot of awards managers, and we know only too well how tricky it can be to keep all those balls in the air without tearing your hair out. Here at AwardStage, we pride ourselves on helping organisers through the most painful parts of the process - so, with Mental Health Awareness week approaching, we wanted to run through the multitude of ways AwardStage can ease furrowed brows and turn a potentially stressful situation into an enjoyable experience for all.
First up, our fees include ‘assisted implementation’*, which basically means we’ll help you get your awards platform up and running. We can offer advice and guidance on the best way to set up your programme, assist you with your entry forms, double check your judging rounds...in essence, we can help with most aspects of your awards, as much or as little as you want!
Most awards managers we know have woken up in a cold sweat worrying about their entry numbers. So many entrants start an entry but then leave it sitting as a draft - with AwardStage you can easily send a gentle nudge to all those people with a partly completed entry, persuading - or even incentivising! - them to hit the ‘submit’ button.
On a similar note, it seems there will always be those who remember a vital piece of info after they’ve submitted their entry. With AwardStage, you can avoid the stress of receiving tons of individual requests, and let entrants edit their entries after submission with one tiny click of a toggle.
Special entry rates and discount codes can drive awards organisers to distraction. Luckily, we've made it super simple to set up different discounts for different time periods. You can even make them entrant-specific. Similarly, if you want to set up different entry rates for different entrant types (free for students, for example…or 50% off for charities), or categories, then AwardStage can facilitate that.
Sharing results with your entrants can also be a source of stress - nobody wants to send individual emails to hundreds of entrants with the judges’ feedback. Our system allows you to share scores, criteria comments, and overall comments, in any combination, with all entrants or individuals, at the click of a button.
Another potential pain point is judging: your judges are busy people who, more often than not, are doing you a favour, so you’ll want to keep them on side! With AwardStage, even the most complex scoring system is straightforward to set up, and is super slick for judges to use. We’re really proud to say that, on average, judges give AwardStage four out of five stars for user experience, citing navigation and the ability to download entries as particular highlights.
“Super easy to use - smooth like a perfectly pulled espresso! Scoring and rating felt effortless, and even with tons of entries, the platform made it a breeze to differentiate and judge fairly. Loved the experience!” Judge
“Easy to navigate!” Judge
“Highly user-friendly, with access anytime, anywhere.” Judge
Running an awards programme, with all its moving parts, is enough to test anyone’s composure, but we like to think that AwardStage can turn a potentially stressful situation into plain sailing. If you’d like to chat to us about how AwardStage can streamline your awards process, just drop us a line or book a call - we’d love to help!
*Except our Lite tier.
