by Lindsay Nash | Aug 4, 2026 | Articles
If you’re evaluating awards management software, you’ve probably grown used to the usual feature lists. Judging modes, judging logins, scoring mechanisms. But, what do these features actually look like for your judges?
And this is an important vantage point. Your judges are important people, often lions of their industry, and their time is extremely valuable. A confusing or clunky judging experience can slow down or disrupt their task at hand, or worse, frustrate them enough to risk losing their support and participation altogether.
But the good news is that this isn’t the case in Award Force, which is known for its intuitive judging experience, beautiful design and ease of use.
“Judging has never been easier since adopting Award Force,” said Elizabeth Rogers, an awards manager with Inspire Leadership Network. “Judges can navigate the system easily, and typically any issues on their part are easily rectified.”
In this article, we’ll walk you through the judging process in Award Force, screen by screen, from the moment a judge gets their invite to the moment they submit their final score.
A judge’s experience starts with how the program manager brings them onto the platform, since this shapes what a judge’s very first interaction looks like.
Award Force supports several different approaches: adding judges individually, importing a larger judging panel in bulk, sending judges an invitation to participate, or, for programs with public voting, enabling judge self-registration.
Whichever method you choose, the outcome for the judge is the same: they receive their login details or an invitation, set their password and log in to their own account. From there, they see the judge’s workspace, and only the entries they’ve been assigned to judge; nothing else in the program is visible to them. It’s a clean, single-purpose entry point: no separate portal to figure out, no unrelated settings or entries cluttering the view.
Watch: How to add judges in Award Force
Once logged in, the judge is presented with a confidentiality agreement. This is an optional yet popular option for those looking to add built-in integrity to the judging process.
Once the agreement is signed, the judge lands on their judging assignments view, their home base for the entire assessment period. This is where their assignments live: the entries they’ve been asked to judge, organised by category, round or score set depending on how the program is structured.
This view gives judges a clear sense of scope from the outset, including how many entries they have to get through and how their progress is tracking against that total.
For a judge trying to plan out their time across a busy week, this visibility matters more than it might seem. Nobody wants to open a judging portal and have no idea whether they’re looking at 12 entries or 120.
Once the judge clicks “Start,” the entries can be viewed in list or gallery view.
From this view, a judge selects an entry to begin their assessment. This is where the entry itself comes into view: media, attachments, written responses and any supporting material the entrant submitted, presented in a format designed for review rather than data entry.
A well-structured entry form pays off here, since a clean, logically ordered submission is significantly faster and easier to assess than one that wasn’t designed with judges in mind.
Depending on how you’ve configured the score set, this might mean the judge assigning numeric scores against defined criteria, making a qualifying decision, ranking entries, or a combination of methods. Judges can typically add comments alongside their scores, which can be useful both for their own reference and, depending on program settings, as feedback that can be shared back with entrants or used internally to justify a decision.
Judging rarely happens in one sitting, so scores and comments are saved as the judge works, meaning they can return to a partially assessed entry without losing progress. This matters in practice because rarely do judges have the time to block out an uninterrupted afternoon to get through their full list in one go.
One of the most common judging systems in Award Force is VIP judging, which enables judges to score based on your specific criteria or scoring rubric. We’ll show that below.
Alongside the entry, judges see any judging instructions or contextual guidance the program manager has added, using content blocks to explain what a category is looking for, how to interpret specific criteria, or what “good” looks like for that round.
This is a small but important detail: judges assessing unfamiliar categories or criteria shouldn’t have to guess what’s expected of them, or dig through a separate handbook to find out. You can include helpful advice on judging right here.
Judges also have the option on the entry to abstain from judging, in the case of a conflict of interest, for example.
Once one entry is scored, a judge moves to the next, working through their assignment list at their own pace. Throughout this process, the judging dashboard keeps up to date on what’s been completed and what’s still outstanding, so a judge always knows where they stand—no separate spreadsheet required to keep tabs on their own progress.
Once a judge has worked through their assignments, their scores are submitted and the judging round moves forward. From here, the process shifts to the program manager’s side: where the platform automatically calculates scores, identifies leaders, and moves entries into the next round if your program has one.
For the judge, their part is done: a straightforward, defined endpoint to what has been a clear process from start to finish.
Why does the experience matter for your judges? A platform that’s confusing, slow or unclear puts a program manager in an awkward position: asking already-generous volunteers to work around software friction on top of everything else being asked of them. It’s one of the most common, and most reasonable, objections that comes up when awards programs evaluate competition judging software: what exactly are we asking our judges to do?
Award Force is built around making that answer as simple as possible: easy, secure platform login, clear assignments, contextual guidance where it’s needed and a scoring process that fits around a judge’s own schedule. If you’re comparing platforms, it’s worth asking any vendor to show you exactly this: the actual judging screen your judges would be viewing.
Learn more about the Award Force judging suite.
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