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.

"The support on Award Force is the best I have EVER experienced"

Kommentare: I inherited an open Award season to manage and was able to come up to speed fairly quickly due to the intuitive nature of the platform and the SUPERB support I got from Award Force e.g. one on one training calls, common help tips embedded in the platform (ie don't have to go to another screen and back and forth but can take action in the platform with the tips right there on the same screen), and extraordinarily fast responses to my emails asking how to do certain things. I am managing our 2nd season and it is going very smoothly and I am digging deeper into the functionality that is available. This is our team's second year using the platform and it works extremely well for the needs that we have and I highly recommend the SW if you need to manage an Awards program.

Vorteile: 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.

Nachteile: 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.

"Amazing and professional, with great support team."

Kommentare: More entries than expected and we saved a lot of administrative fees. Their support team is very helpful and fast in responding, which was a big plus for us.

Vorteile: 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.

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

"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.

"Award Force Review"

Vorteile: 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.

Nachteile: 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.