by Bright Ewuru | Jul 21, 2025 | Articles
Contests can be incredibly versatile for your brand, helping build awareness, grow your business, drive revenue and facilitate innovation in your industry.
Managing a contest requires some effort, as the program runs through its various stages from planning to execution and follow-up.
Planning to run a contest? Check out the different stages of a contest lifecycle and how our contest management software, Award Force, supports each one.
The program planning and setup phase of a contest is the foundation of the entire process. It’s at this point that you define the purpose of the contest, whether that be community engagement, brand awareness or general recognition. This stage is essential for clarifying your target audience, aligning the contest with organisational goals and defining its structure.
To avoid common pitfalls of the planning phase, it’s important to select the contest format, establish eligibility criteria, develop a timeline, onboard stakeholders and determine the rules of engagement.
Contest management software can help your team members design the contest. Award Force, for example, offers category configuration, a feature ideal for setting the contest format. With our pre-launch check, you can confirm that everything is in place before accepting any entries.
Attracting quality participants and building visibility for your contest is what comes next. This involves officially launching your awards program, running strategic campaigns to raise awareness, and communicating deadlines, eligibility criteria, submission guidelines and other crucial information.
Thorough promotion and a proper call for entry can boost entry rates.
Content marketing, social media, email outreach, paid ads and influencer engagement can help reach potential entrants across geographic locations and demographics. Award Force’s social sharing functionality makes it easy for team members to grow awareness on social media. You can leverage your homepage on the Award Force platform to generate interest in the program and submission.
The submission phase comes next, and that’s when it’s time for entrants to officially enter the contest. Entrants can submit through applicable categories, making it streamlined for both entrants and your judges.
The submission phase can make or break your contest. Award Force offers multiple features that aid submission management and ensure a hassle-free submission journey for entrants. Some of these functionalities include:
To provide value to your judges and uphold the prestige of your contest, it’s important to ensure that only worthy submissions are shortlisted. The moderation phase can be very helpful in terms of screening for eligibility. Entries can be assessed on pre-defined criteria, and the successful entries advance to the judging phase.
This phase guarantees integrity and makes the process effortless for everyone. With Award Force’s entrant eligibility checker, you can check for eligibility using pre-set criteria. Our contest software can also notify all entrants of their eligibility status and courteously redirect ineligible entrants.
During the judging phase of a contest, decisions are made by judges about which entries ultimately deserve recognition based on established judging criteria. Transparency, expertise and impartiality are crucial at this point.
Award Force allows contest managers to set defined judging criteria and offers audit trails to log every score. Entries can also be assigned to judges based on expertise and context awareness. Award Force also supports anonymous judging, ensuring that judges evaluate submissions without bias.
What’s more, flexible judging modes are available to suit different contest formats.
This phase of the contest lifecycle validates the efforts of the entrants and the judging process, reinforcing the legitimacy of the outcome.
Winner announcements can be made publicly, attracting media coverage and boosting public engagement. Award Force facilitates private winner announcements through automated notifications and emails to notify winners.
This stage is ideal for gathering feedback about the contest; the insight can be used to refine other contest cycles. During this phase, you can also strengthen relations with stakeholders.
Award Force provides a comprehensive dashboard, reporting and exporting tools perfect for tracking data. You can also send automated appreciation emails to all participants.
Each phase of the contest lifecycle is crucial to running a thriving contest. See how Award Force can support every part of your contest management.
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