by Bright Ewuru | Mar 19, 2025 | Articles
A smooth intuitive submission experience can make your awards program shine in a way that boosts the chances of entrants promoting your program and returning in future seasons.
By eliminating complexities and providing valuable support, your submission process can engage entrants and encourage them to complete their applications. A user-friendly and accessible interface can boost participation rates by attracting and catering to a larger pool of applicants.
An engaging submission journey enhances the candidate experience so that, regardless of the outcome, entrants come away feeling valued.
Looking to improve your entrant’s journey through submission? Here are elements of a successful submission experience
Your entry portal gives you a valuable opportunity to offer your entrants an amazing awards entry experience. It should be user-friendly and intuitive so that it builds affinity with your brand and program from the get-go.
A good way to achieve this is by designing your entry form to match your brand. Spotlight your sponsors by adding their logos. Use captivating high-resolution images and video to provide information to your entrants.
Try to incorporate best practices for entry form design.:
Entry management matters too—entrants should be able to track and otherwise manage their entries in the submission portal.
Smooth registration is a hallmark of a positive submission journey. It involves making registration hassle-free for entrants by allowing them to register with their email address, mobile number or third-party tools like social media accounts.
Consider providing Single Sign-On (SSO) and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) for easy login to the registration platform from other systems using a single set of secure credentials.
User consent options and data confidentiality during registration are paramount. So, your registration process should comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or other regional and applicable regulations.
Accessibility is a core feature of a great submission journey. Your awards program should be free of any barrier to entry. An accessible submission process levels the playing field, ensuring that non-native speakers, persons with disabilities and those with limited tech access can submit their applications.
Additionally, it demonstrates your commitment to ethical best practices and compliance with relevant digital accessibility laws such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2.
To build accessibility into the submission process, consider allowing multiple submission formats and providing multi-lingual options. Enable screen-reading and provide captions for video content. Ensure consistent legible font use as well as customisable colour contrast.
Uploading files is often the core of submission. To guarantee a seamless submission experience, make it easy for your entrants to upload the type of files you are seeking or easily accept links to files already uploaded to other public platforms. It should also be compatible with files of all sizes to maintain the quality of entries and support specifying file types per question.
A bulk upload feature and visual representation of the upload progress can streamline uploading and keep entrants informed of how long the uploading process has to go. It’s essential to give your applicants control over the uploaded files, allowing them to caption the attachments and also rearrange, edit or delete attachments as they choose during the submission stage.
Entering an awards program and submitting applications can be a stressful process for some entrants. It requires maximum attention, so applicants might need to take a break. They could make mistakes as they provide vital details; likewise, their internet connection or device could go on the fritz during application.
A great submission journey requires entrant support to ensure these issues don’t compromise entry. An auto-save functionality can save entries in the background so applicants can resume from the last checkpoint in case of an interruption instead of having to start over. Likewise, an error prevention feature can alert entrants to mistakes such as omitted required questions and incorrect answer formats.
Contextual help to guide entrants on how to answer questions can give your applicants more clarity, saving their time and making their responses more effective.
A fantastic entrance experience means putting the entrant at the forefront of your awards program design. From an engaging entry process to ease and accessibility, these features (or lack thereof) can make or break the submission journey.
Want to make it easier for both you and your entrants? Learn more about Award Force, which powers your program to incredible entry growth by giving your participants the entry experience they deserve.
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