Award Force

Money, time and resources well spent!

Kommentare: Using a designated and bespoke product like AF, has taken out so much stress and uncertainty around getting the nominations in and judged remotely. we had over 1000 entries that needed to go through a very clear and strict judging process (in light of being fare and transparent ) We could let judging take place remotely and smoothly, with the confidence of our data security and personal reputational image being protected.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

Great support, intuitive, submitters and judges love it!

Kommentare: This company really gets the importance of support. When onboarding, it's easy to get overwhelmed, worried, stressed, and panicked. We did not experience any of that when onboarding with AF. Our rep was with us the entire way. Our millions of questions (and sometimes duplicate questions a week later) were happily answered, she listened and used our particular nomenclatures when responding. I also love the "sanity check" that is offered when a new program is added. Having someone review our program before we go live is invaluable.

Vorteile:

I love that is is easy for our members and judges to use. That ease of use helps with them participating in the awards program in subsequent years.

Nachteile:

Nothing major comes to mind, but I have a couple of minor dislikes. I wish there was better sorting capabilities on the screen views. Not all columns can be sorted. Also, some times our I need to provide reports to our board that the system doesn't provide. Luckily I can download everything into excel and create my own "ad hoc reports when needed.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen: OpenWater und AwardStage

Warum Award Force gewählt wurde: Their product was buggy and difficult to use. The final straw was they raised our pricing more than 300% in one year (with no change in subscription offereings.)

Zuvor genutzte Software: omniCONTESTS

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Award Force: Award Force is very intuitive and user friendly. It offered better scoring options, and methods for creating judging teams. Also, during our due diligence, we spoke with other AF users about their feedback from submitters and judges, and all raved about the feedback. We are now one of those ravers as well. Our members and judges love AF! So do we.

Award Force has been a life saver

Kommentare: Despite a few glitches here and there, Award Force truly has been a lifesaver for me and my organization -- it has streamlined the award process so much for us, which makes life easier for our users/nominators, and also frees up my time to do other important work, including giving feedback on submissions to increase the overall quality we're seeing. Keep up the great work!

Vorteile:

I run an awards program that gets more than 4,000 entries a year, and before we found Award Force we were allowing people to submit by just sending us a PDF. It was a huge effort to collect them all, a waste of paper to make a "packet" for judges to read, and a colossal pain to notify the winners and losers using a mail merge. Award Force is like a godsend in that regard -- it allows me to keep all the entries in one place, have the judges evaluate them right with in the system, and then I can notify winners and losers right from the system as well. The software allows me to program my questionnaire so submissions are automatically separated into the appropriate category, easily assign judges, and help users from the back end.

Nachteile:

The software can have a steep learning curve for new users (I onboard new judges all the time as we hire new people and it can be confusing at first). I wish some of the language was more intuitive. The system also sometimes can run slowly if I have a lot of tasks running at once on a big set of entries. And I think this is a problem on the end of my users (they work in places with very strong spam filters), but sometimes the notifications I send don't arrive where they're supposed to. I suspect they're getting caught in quarantine, but it causes some extra work for me on the back end having to look up individual submissions.

Awards tool for my awards program

Kommentare: Overall experience is good with the tool. easy to set up and reviewing and run the nomination report. but the bug issue is keep happening all the time. this make me not very happy with this tool.

Vorteile:

The structure, the analysis report, export the data I received. allow the attachment for people submission

Nachteile:

there are some bugs happened in last couple of days when I open my nomination process to large audience.

An Amazing Option for Project Management

Vorteile:

It's amazing! It looks great, the forward facing aspect has gotten many compliments. You can customize and tweak so much that you can make it work for almost anything! And the price is great! Customer service is very responsive and so helpful! They clearly know their stuff.

Nachteile:

-The built-in spreadsheet function is not great. -You can't have a submission from an anonymous source or without requiring a login. -If you want to have a lot of programs/ applications open at once, that tab view can get pretty cluttered and overwhelming. It would be nice if you could hide them by category or something.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen: SurveyMonkey

Warum Award Force gewählt wurde: To get a better interface and improved functionality at less cost!

Zuvor genutzte Software: WizeHive

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Award Force: This had it all in terms of what we needed and looked great. I would definitely choose this again.