Awards programs achieve 26% growth in entry volumes with Award Force

This article was updated to reflect our 2026 entry growth rate.

We often say there are many reasons to choose Award Force as your awards management software. For example, there is our sleek user interface that makes it easy for everyone from entrants to judges to use the software. There’s also our five-star support team that was named the best in the awards software industry. 

Our clients consistently report that Award Force saves them time and money and provides a great experience for their entire awards community.

But program growth is also a huge motivating factor for many awards programs. Not only is entry growth important for programs that have an entry fee component––it’s important for those relying on sponsors, those with a goal to increase brand awareness or those programs reliant on increasing the popularity of their awards. Entry growth is an incredibly useful indicator of whether those goals are being met.

Award Force is highly engineered to provide a great entrant experience—all with the aim of helping our clients’ awards programs receive better quality entries, and more of them. So it was of no surprise that our recent calculations showed that on average, Award Force clients achieve a staggering 25.95% increase in submitted entries, season-on-season.

Award Force clients achieve a 25.95% increase in submitted entries. Here’s why…

With Award Force, awards programs can take advantage of powerful features to provide participants with a delightful experience that keeps their entrants coming back, year after year.

The Award Force platform boasts a wide range of features to promote awards program growth, provide a great experience and get more, higher quality entries. 

Let’s take a look at some of the most popular features.

Great experience from the get-go

The entry experience on the Award Force platform is second to none. The minute the entrant arrives on your awards homepage, they’ll be met with a beautifully crafted registration screen easily configured to match your brand and put your awards in a great light. If you have sponsors, there are high visibility locations available to show them off. 

Registration is a cinch too. Apart from the standard username and password set up, entrants can also register with Facebook or Twitter. If your entrants are registered on a separate system outside of Award Force, you can use Single-Sign On (SSO) to bypass registration completely and securely. 

To round that off, our clients have access to more than 45 native, professionally translated languages to offer in the platform. If your program chooses to run in more than one language, entrants can select the language they’d prefer to use for a truly personable awards process. 

The entrant portal

Once entrants have accessed the platform, they’ll be guided to their entry management page where they can start their entry. 

As with other locations throughout the entrant experience, you can configure this section to look and feel like your brand. There is an extremely handy set of content areas (we call them content blocks) to insert any information pertinent to your entrants. Add text, images, audio and even video to welcome, guide and set expectations for your entrants.

Entrants also have access to view any secondary pages you may have set up for them to view. There are many uses for these pages, ranging from introductory “About” pages, “Meet the judges” pages or simply a message from your program sponsors or other VIPs.

The entry form

Not all entry form builders are made equal. And that’s evident from the moment you begin using Award Force.

Using best practice entry form design principles, easy drag-and-drop form building and sophisticated form tools like conditional logic, you’ll be able to create an exemplary entry experience for your entrants. 

As with the entrant portal, you’ll have access to content blocks to add text, images and video to help guide entrants along the way.

And with more than 20 different field types, including popular options like checkboxes and drop-down selectors, you can ask the right questions the right way and get consistent responses from all entrants. Our entry form builder is supremely powerful and a major contributor to entry growth. Learn more about its magical qualities here.

A small but mighty feature of the entry process is the auto-save functionality built into the entry experience. As users complete answers to your questions, Award Force saves the entrant responses in the background. If the entrant forgets to save their progress for whatever reason, Award Force ensures their hard work is not lost. Which means you’ll have fewer abandoned entry forms and more quality entries! 

Easy communication

With Award Force you can easily send emails and notifications directly from the platform to your entrants. You can set up automatic notifications to alert entrants of overdue tasks or confirm their submission has been received or you can send more personal email communications to specific entrants to inform them of important information like shortlisting, request resubmissions or even advise they’ve won your award! 

All notifications can use personalisation tokens (merge fields) to provide a friendly personalised experience to your entrants. And don’t forget, just like the rest of the Award Force platform, communications from within the Award Force platform are configurable to match your brand so entrants will always know who is sending the email!  

Awards program growth, season after season

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more. With Award Force, your awards program can take advantage of powerful features to provide participants with a delightful experience to grow your program, season after season. Learn more about those features here.

Want to try it out for yourself? Watch our demo videos, take a self-guided tour or book a call with one of our friendly team members to learn more.