by Craig Casten | May 28, 2018 | Feature focus
On the surface, attachments in Award Force are exactly what you think they are, a means for your entrants to include additional information or media with their submission.
But scratch a little deeper and you will find attachments in Award Force are not just a paperclip on the side of an input box, they are a fully-fledged power tool which gives you, your team and your program participants an exceptional experience, leaving you wondering “why doesn’t everyone handle attachments like that?”
Your entrants can upload any type of file to Award Force. If the file type is audio/photo/video Award Force allows your entrants to preview their upload, from within the Award Force system. Size doesn’t matter either, Award Force handles mega file uploads with ease.
Program managers have complete control over the file types and file size accepted for upload too. Simply check the file types you want to allow, the maximum file size, and Award Force will do the rest.
Program managers can include fields to be associated with attachments, allowing entrants to provide additional data on each individual attachment. Perfect for helping you manage attachments or find specific details about an attachment with ease.
Some photography contests use this field to ask entrants to provide credits, dates, or conditions a particular photo was taken in, while some programs request entrants to provide a short overview of an uploaded document. Your imagination and your program requirements have free reign here.
Attachments are so much more than your run-of-the-mill upload paperclip. Entrants can see the progress of their attachments upload (particularly important for large files), both in terms of data transferred and % completion, they receive visual feedback of the file type they have uploaded and if transcoding is necessary (in the case of video files), Award Force will show the progress of this too. If they don’t like the order of their uploaded attachments, they can change it!
Our philosophy is to ensure your entrants have as much control over their submission as possible. By doing this, we can help to alleviate a little of the anxiety some entrants deal with and in turn improves their overall experience with your program.
Award Force is designed to help judges / assessors / adjudicators get through entries as efficiently as possible and this thread runs through viewing attachments as well. To aid entry identification, uploaded image attachments are automatically used as thumbnails for the entry. Award Force also allows judges to download attachments or, if it is a supported video, audio or image, experience it, right from within Award Force.
For the program manager, setting up Award Force to accept attachments is extremely easy. Simply tell Award Force what the size limitations are (if any), what file types you want to accept and what the field should look like (name, hint text, etc) and you are done.
Worried you are asking an entrant to upload potentially sensitive data? No problem, you can set Award Force to provide additional levels of security to the attachment field and give your entrants added peace of mind.
Award Force gives you flexibility and control over what happens with attachments. A few additional controls you can apply if necessary:
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