Award Force

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.

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.

Kommentare: -Ease of use
-Highly accessible with information that is always available - whether on a desktop, lapto, tablet or mobile device
-Eliminates virtually all manual paper work that our previous system required
- Easy to contact all users or subsets of users via email using the Broadcast Message feature, which was something that previously we had to do using email and determining who we needed to contact

Vorteile: The Award Force management and support teams were incredibly helpful during our entire selection process, set up phase and implementation. There was always someone available for answers, no matter that we are located in the US and their main office is in Australia. From our initial conversations as far as what was on our "must have" list and our "nice to have" list of features, AF was able to make a few small customizations to their program to give us 100% of the items on our "must have" list and 95% on our "nice to have" list of items. They appear to constantly have the customer as their #1 focus and even after we launched came back to us with an idea to use something in their existing platform in order to offer us a small work around to give us something that was on our "nice to have list" that would help our judging community. We've had nothing but positive reviews from our client base - from our entrants, to our judges and even our accountant who compiles the entrant scores. The system is incredibly secure, with various different user profiles that only gives them the access they require. Award Force even created two new user roles specifically for us based on our award program requirements and what our users needed to have access to in the system. I can't praise our implementation manager and the entire AF support team more as they were always available and never made it seem like even my dumbest question wasn't something they took seriously.

Nachteile: There is very little that I don't like about Award Force. But if I had to pick one: since the system is used by multiple award program clients around the world there are a few small areas that don't quite give us exactly what we need and that weren't able to be changed for us. However, these are just a few small items and through conversations with our AF implementation manager we devised ways to get what we needed through small work arounds that didn't add any more time or effort to what we had done previously for these items. So in the end, even though there were a few small "cons" in AF, the amount of time that we save using Award Force verses what we used before, along with the amount of information that is now available to us where it wasn't before, far outweigh the small amount of cons in the system.

Kommentare: When we realised we needed to up our game with online entries for our Awards we researched every product on the market. The investment was quite significant for our annual not-for-profit Awards so we needed to ensure we made the right decision - and we now know we did! Every single member of the Award Force team that we've dealt with from our initial enquiry through to ongoing support has been an absolute pleasure to deal with. They are incredibly responsive but never pushy, providing the exact information you need without delay and are always happy to help - even with the daft queries we're all capable of from time to time... The system is so intuitive, logical and easy to use that I have been very self sufficient since my introduction session. When I have a query or start working on a new stage of the Awards the online training and extensive reference guides have been invaluable resource to find the answer within minutes. I've only had to submit two helpdesk tickets and both have been responded to and resolved incredibly quickly. We have received more entries than any previous year of the Awards and have received nothing but positive feedback from our entrants. To reach the judging stage without a single issue with the user accounts or entries has been fantastic and is a real credit to the Award Force team that develop and manage the system, so a HUGE thank you to them for making my life as an Awards Manager so easy. The time (and headaches!) I have saved this year has been amazing - it just all happens in the background while you keep a watchful eye on the dashboard and smile... The thing I really love about Award Force is that I'll get an email just to check how thing are going through the various stages of the Awards, reminding me that support is always there if and when I need it - it's like having an Award Force guardian angel! Our entire experience has been amazing, from the initial enquiry through system set-up, entries and judging, every aspect has been smooth, seamless and stress free. Award Force and the team behind it have exceeded all my expectations. Thank you!

Vorteile: Award Force is so easy to use, yet delivers a thoroughly comprehensive solution. The system is so clear, intuitive and logical it's an absolute pleasure to use. You can navigate your way around without ever getting lost or confused, everything is exactly where you'd expect to find it and you always feel completely in control. From the clean and clear layout you may initially be fooled into thinking it's not very sophisticated, but you'd be wrong. It delivers everything you need, and much much more, they've just worked very hard to make sure you don't have to.
Whilst you have the ability to customise the site so you are able to reflect your brand and visual identity, you don't have to be a designer or web developer to understand it. I've never felt out of my depth configuring anything on Award Force and nothing has ever felt onerous, just simple and straightforward providing the result you were hoping for quickly and easily. The versatility of the system means I've never had to compromise and can have the exact set-up I want without it taking an age to change hundreds of settings, it just lets you choose exactly what you want then replicate it as many times as you wish. The extensive reference guides and online tutorials are an amazing resource, if you're unsure of anything you can have the answer within a few minutes - usually with a step by step guide!

Nachteile: I have to confess that I have struggled with this question, but the ability to sort by all of the fields within a view would be helpful. It would also be helpful to be able to configure bespoke reports for export, but it's not exactly a chore to have everything exported and then just choose to keep the ones you want. The things I've mentioned above may well be possible, I'm by no means an expert on every aspect of the system and I find new features and options every week!

Kommentare: Ease of time on the administrators end. Ease of use and uploading ability to make all things electronic on the users end. Wrap up after the award process was so simple! That was the best part. Even though there is a cost that we didn't have before, our organization found that the benefits outweighed the costs. We needed to be all electronic and needed to alleviate the time component from the administrators, who are all volunteers. This program did that for us.

Vorteile: The ease of use on the user and the administrator ends was great. The administration learning process was not complex and Award Force staff took the time to train us. The entry process for the users worked so well. It was simple! The part that sold our organization was the wrap-up portion. We didn't have to do much of anything and the program did it for us. Our members could login and see the winners' entries. This saved our admins a ton of time compiling award winners and sending them out to everyone. That was an amazing process! I would definitely recommend this, and have, to other organizations if they want to go all digital and have a simple back-end process to administer, and help the users get their information entered and then received quickly.

Nachteile: Like any software, you have to learn it. It takes a little time at first to learn, but once you do, it is not hard to utilize. The Award Force team was very helpful through that process, though. There are some unique ways to find information within the software, so it just takes working with it to gain an understanding. The payment system was something that we had to inform our membership of, since this software is based in Australia, when using an United States credit card, it is best to charge all entries at one time and not individually, as they card will question foreign purchases and possibly shut the card off temporarily. This happened to us, but once we realized why, we explained it to the membership and then it worked fine.