The Awards management updates that got us through 2020

Whew! What a year, right? Without a doubt, 2020 will be marked in history as a challenging year for the entire world. But, don’t shelve the year just yet. It’s important to take a moment to recognise your achievements and success. You made it through a tough year. You came out stronger and wiser. 

We are so proud to support our clients across the globe who have worked tirelessly to recognise excellence despite the challenges. And as we look back on our own year, we are also proud of our people and our award software product, which was named the world’s best awards management software for the second straight quarter by G2 Crowd. Here are some of the highlights.

For when the world went remote…

As people and companies across the globe pivoted to a remote existence early in the year, we found ourselves positioned to help. As a globally distributed team that has worked remotely for almost seven years, we quickly published guides and articles to help you through it, including:

• The fast guide to going remote…right now
• How to run a remote judging event
• How to run a virtual awards gala
• Ebook: Running remote—How to manage a remote awards program without physical events

For an improved user experience…

We released lots of exciting updates to the Award Force software this year, and that includes a host of new features to improve the user experience for program managers, entrants and judges.  

Some of those updates include:

• A new and improved entry form builder featuring an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor, which allows you to experience exactly what your entrants would see as you build. 
• Vote processing speed received a huge performance boost, minimising result calculations to near real-time.
• A new settings menu with improved visual design for easier and faster navigation. The whole left-hand navigation is now also collapsible, providing greater control over your workspace. 

For program managers…

Our goal was to make your life as an awards manager easier, and these updates all worked toward that goal. Improvements include:

• A powerful new API to help you integrate your awards with other external systems and software.
• Automated tagging, which allows you to automatically apply specific tags and kick off other actions automatically. 
• More of the interface text in Award Force is now customisable, meaning you can tailor the text to fit your program terminology exactly.
• A new “less than” and “greater than” rule you can apply to conditional field settings, providing you more control over what questions your entrants see.
• New language options for the platform including Finnish, Lithuanian and Hindi, bringing the total language translations to more than 25!

For your judges…

Over the course of this year, we’ve zeroed in on ways to save your judges time and provide even more flexibility in what they can see, creating an even better environment for making great judging decisions. This includes:

• Improvements to the judge’s view, where judges can now add, remove and rearrange columns to display what’s relevant to them.
• An easy way for judges to view weighted or unweighted scores and see score sets in separate columns, better highlighting each score.

For your entrants…

We understand just how important it is to offer a seamless and easy experience for your entrants. This often means more entries, better quality submissions and fewer support requests.

To improve entrant user experience, we’ve made the following improvements:

• Users can now recover access to their Award Force account with a “magic” one-click login (also available for mobile numbers).
• A flag selector and geolocation for the phone field in the entry form, which prefills the matching country code for entrants. 

And, coming soon in 2021…

We’re so excited about what’s coming next! Big, new features are on the horizon, packed with time-saving updates and powerful new improvements all designed to help your program grow and prosper in the new year.

Highlights include:

• Data residency: As part of our commitment to offering you the most secure awards management platform on the market, we’ll be offering you the option to choose which region you want your data stored.
• A judging management dashboard: You’ll have a new dashboard to help you stay on top of your judging all within one all-encompassing view.
• A judging setup wizard: We’re creating an easy way to set up your judging configuration to help you get started faster.
• Theming updates: We’re making it easier for you to theme your account with modern and efficient ways to extend your brand to the awards platform.
• Powerful integration tools: We’ll be releasing a powerful collection of webhooks to help you do even more with Award Force. Our Zapier integration is now in beta and we’ll be improving the functionality available there as well! 

As we look back on 2020, we want to thank all our amazing clients who worked so hard this year to continue to recognise excellence. We look forward to growing with you in 2021. 

Want to learn more about the Award Force software? Watch our demo videos, take a self-guided tour or book a call to learn more.