Moving forward: what’s new on AwardStage

It’s been a busy year on the platform so far, and we thought it was about time we stopped, took stock, and told you about everything that’s changed under the hood (and on the surface) over the last few months.

We’re not going to pretend every update is life-changing - some are more ‘quietly makes your Tuesday easier’ than headline news. But taken together, they add up to a platform that makes awards processes noticeably smoother than before. Here's what’s landed so far this year.

Concurrent judging rounds
Let’s start with the big one. Until now, if you wanted to run, say, a longlisting round and a shortlisting round, you had to wait for one to fully close before the next could open.

Not anymore. You can now run multiple judging rounds concurrently. That means longlisting and shortlisting can overlap, regional rounds can run alongside a global round, or you can simply give different judging panels the breathing room to work at their own pace without holding up everyone else.

Hide entry form fields from entrants
It’s already possible to hide entry form fields from judges (handy for anything you don’t want to influence scoring, such as organisation names or entry fees). Now you can do the same thing in reverse: hide fields from entrants.

This is great for anything that’s for internal or admin use only - think reference numbers, notes for your team, or fields you fill in yourself after an entry comes in. Entrants get a cleaner, simpler form, and you get to keep the behind-the-scenes admin stuff exactly where it belongs: behind the scenes.

Easier tracking of judges’ scored categories
Judges juggling multiple categories no longer have to guess (or dig around) to work out what’s left to do. There’s now a clear view of scoring progress per category, so judges can see at a glance which categories still have outstanding entries waiting to be scored.

It may not sound like a huge thing, but it’s super useful for busy judges, and saves valuable admin time trying to figure out who still has scoring to do.

Enhanced jury assignment, rotation, and grouping
Assigning judges and juries to entries has had a proper overhaul. You can now organise juries into groups, and set up automatic rotation of entries among juries rather than assigning everything by hand.

If you’re running an awards programme with dozens (or hundreds) of entries and multiple juries, this is the kind of thing that turns a spreadsheet-juggling afternoon into a five-minute setup job. It also makes it much easier to keep judging fair and balanced across larger panels.

Campaign tracking
If you’ve ever sent out a round of emails or social posts promoting your awards and then wondered which ones actually worked, this one's for you. You can now generate custom tracking URLs for your comms and see exactly what actions they drove - registrations, logins, drafts started, entries submitted, the lot.

So instead of guessing whether that newsletter or LinkedIn post actually moved the needle, you can see it in black and white, and put your energy (and budget) behind the channels that are genuinely bringing entrants in.

Revenue log by entrant
Previously, entry spend showed up line by line, which meant if an entrant had submitted multiple entries over time, you'd have to export the data, or do the maths yourself to see their total spend. Now the platform does it for you: the revenue log shows total spend per entrant, automatically totalling up their entries and spend.

It's a simple change, but it makes it much easier to spot your highest-value entrants at a glance - handy for anything from relationship management to working out where to focus your renewal efforts.

Category import
If you’ve ever had to manually input fifty, a hundred, or several hundred categories one by one, you’ll appreciate this one. You can now import categories straight from a spreadsheet instead of building them out manually in the platform.

For awards with large or complex category structures, it turns a genuinely tedious job into a quick upload.

Download entry invoices directly in AwardStage (Admin)
And finally, a small one that should save admins a fair few browser tabs: you can now download entry invoices directly within AwardStage, without needing to log into Stripe separately. One less system to jump between when you just need a copy of an invoice.

More to come
That’s several solid updates already this year, with more in the works. We build these updates because they come out of real conversations with the people who actually use the platform day to day - our lovely clients! So if there's something that’s bugging you or a feature you wish existed, we'd genuinely like to hear about it - just drop us a line.