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. Understanding each of those stages is key to running a program that attracts quality submissions, rewards the right winners and builds lasting prestige.
Planning to run a contest? This guide walks through each phase of the contest lifecycle and shows how Award Force, our leading contest management software, supports you every step of the way.
The program planning and setup phase of a contest is the foundation of the entire process. Get this right and every subsequent stage becomes easier to manage.
To avoid common pitfalls of the planning phase, it is important to work through each of the following steps carefully:
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.
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With your program configured, the next step is attracting quality participants and building visibility for your contest. A proper call for entry and thorough promotion can boost entry rates.
Effective promotion typically involves:
Award Force’s social sharing functionality makes it easy for team members to grow awareness across social channels. Award Force also functions as contest software for websites, with a configurable homepage that acts as a dedicated landing page to generate interest and direct potential entrants to your submission portal.
SEO tip: Optimise your contest landing page for keywords such as “how to enter [industry] awards”, “[category] contest open for entries” and “[year] awards program submissions”.
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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:
A user-friendly entry portal
These features reduce the administrative burden on your team while ensuring entrants have a positive experience from first click to final submission.
To provide value to your judges, 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 step:
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.
As an online contest manager, Award Force is purpose-built for rigorous judging. Key features inlcude:
A robust judging process strengthens the credibility of your outcomes and builds trust with entrants, sponsors and the broader industry.
The winner announcement is the moment your contest has been building towards. Done well, it validates the efforts of every entrant and reinforces the legitimacy of the entire process.
You have two primary options for announcements:
Award Force facilitates both approaches through automated notifications and emails to notify winners. For programs with a ceremony or staged reveal, you can coordinate announcements across multiple channels from a single platform.
The contest program may be over, but the post-award phase is where you extract the insight that makes your next program even stronger. This stage includes:
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. Award Force is designed to support every stage, from initial setup to post-award reporting, so your team can focus on what matters most: recognising excellence.
The contest lifecycle refers to the end-to-end process of running an awards program or competition. It typically spans seven stages: program planning and setup, call for entries and promotion, submission management, moderation and eligibility screening, judging, winner announcement and post-award wrap-up.
Contest management software is a platform that helps organisations plan, run and manage the full lifecycle of a competition or awards program online. It typically covers entry collection, judging workflows, results management and communications — replacing manual processes such as spreadsheets and email chains.
Award Force is a cloud-based contest management platform that supports every stage of the awards lifecycle. It includes tools for category configuration, entry management, eligibility screening, multi-mode adjudication, winner announcements and post-program reporting.
Attracting quality entries requires a multi-channel promotion strategy that combines content marketing, social media, email outreach, paid advertising and influencer or partner engagement. A clear call for entries with well-communicated eligibility criteria and deadlines is essential.
Award Force allows contest managers to configure judging criteria and assign submissions to judges based on their expertise. Judges score entries through a dedicated interface, with every score logged in a full audit trail. Anonymous judging is available to eliminate bias, and multiple judging modes support different contest formats.
Yes. Award Force supports category configuration for programs of any size and complexity, allowing contest managers to define separate criteria, eligibility rules and judging panels for each category.
The post-award phase involves gathering feedback, analysing program data, communicating with participants and identifying improvements for future cycles. Award Force's reporting and exporting tools make this process straightforward.
Winner announcements can be made publicly to maximise media coverage and engagement, or privately via automated notifications to maintain confidentiality before a formal reveal. Award Force supports both approaches.
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