OpenWater

OpenWater has no competition

Kommentare: Pain-free. They are highly responsive to questions and suggestions. Contest management is an added part of my workload. OpenWater's system keeps it from getting too out of hand. My supervisor deals with the financial aspects. I don't know the details, but she has been able to secure multi-year discounts.

Vorteile:

OpenWater's system is powerful and elegant. I'm only a daily user fwhen our contest is live, approximately half the year. I'm always pleasantly surprised by the improvements they've made when I open the next year's contest. I suspect that we are not using OpenWater's system to its full potential, but what we do utilize more than works for us. Their self-help guides are useful and when they're not, customer service is available (see caveat below). I have had several different dedicated service advisors; all have been uniformly excellent. Our entrants and judges find the system easy to use.

Nachteile:

Communication is mostly by email. If you want a phone call, you need to make an appointment. That said, they are highly responsive when rare problems arise.

How Open Water Saved the SME Awards and Scholarship Programs!

Kommentare: It has been a wonderful relationship working with the Open Water Customer Service and OW IT department.

Vorteile:

Top Notch Customer Service Representatives. I never had to wait for someone to help when I needed it. Ease of implementation. User satisfaction. Virtually effortless to maintain and copy to the next year award cycle.

Nachteile:

I have not found anything to complain about or wish I could have. Our last awards and scholarship was such a horrible software--Open Water has been a dream come true. The obstacle we have had the most problem with is our emails from the Open Water system getting through to our customers/users and not going to their spam accounts.

Needs to be User Friendly

Vorteile:

Customer support was responsive when we had any issues

Nachteile:

I did not like the way it is designed, it is not easy to navigate.

Data Management

Kommentare: Overall I have been satisfied with the excellent technical support I received during the height of my event planning and management. I really appreciate having one dedicated support person[sensitive content hidden]). She's great!! The platform does a great job of being my central hub for collecting submissions.

Vorteile:

I like having all my symposium submission data in one place and the ability to run reports.

Nachteile:

There is a steep learning curve if you are brining new team members on to manage the platform. It is not an intuitive platform. I don't like the website platform. It lacks the ability to have more customizable features. I end up not using the website for my event because aesthetically it is not appealing. I wish the virtual display of submissions. Public view was better. It looks outdated.

A very adaptable solution.

Vorteile:

We weren't actively looking for a contest management solution but a Sales representative reached out to gauge our interest in OpenWater, after hearing about our Construction Intern Awards scholarship program. Up until that point we had been using Wordpress to manage this competition, which included a lot of manual maintenance, popular voting plugins, a bulky media gathering process, entry content display delays, and several other headaches. On top of that, we had to use other solutions to manage the judging portion of the contest, which involved either rigging survey products or creating a mess of spreadsheets but both caused confusion for the judges. What we liked most about OpenWater is that it addressed all of the above problems we were facing and allowed us the freedom to customize almost everything. Every other contest management software that we looked at wouldn't let us use our own CSS/HTML to style the site, relying on some sort of WYSIWIG instead. After the initial setup, OpenWater was a huge timesaver. We have also had outstanding support reps since the beginning of implementation. We've asked for a lot during our time using OpenWater and they definitely come through for us.

Nachteile:

Our contest is set up in a pretty unconventional way (weekly popular vote-based contests combined with a separate traditional scholarship application), and OpenWater has done a good job of keeping up with our requests. There are several smaller, nit-picky things about the popular vote functionality that could be improved but it's still better than what we were doing before. Another factor that we've had to work around is the fact that the contest dashboard looks the same for everyone who visits the dashboard, regardless of user type (applicant/judge/voter), which can be confusing for some users.