Women of the Future

Awardist began from a specific pain point: compiling evidence for Judges. Imagine the work needed to download answers, CVs, press releases, order them, combine them, and starting from the beginning if they needed to change anything. The process alone could take 4 hours per category and with 15 categories and three annual awards, the workload was painstaking.

Their workflow consisted of Woofoo forms, Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Excel, countless emails and WeShare. The experience was fragmented for Women of the Future and their judges.

Shortlisting and Judging ran on a series of mammoth over-the-email-limit chunky PDF files and spreadsheets. Tracking feedback and conducting in-person judging sessions took time away from the team's real work, increased the likelihood of errors and created GDPR exposure.

Women of the Future wanted to differentiate their programme and deliver value to Judges, Nominees and their staff. Rather than choosing an off-the-shelf solution, they wanted to enhance their 25-year brand.

Working directly with Awardist, they were able to deliver new features quickly and have any issues sorted before they became a problem.

The partnership has been running for over two years. This has not been a one-off install with slow email support. With deliberate work, we've built a platform that gets out of the way and enables the team to do the real work building relationships with their sponsors, judges and nominees.

After the PDF compilation, Women of the Future decided to put it's trust into Awardist and now all of their nominees flow through Awardist's forms. The Forms themselves are bespoke, handle complex flow logic and importantly, allow the team to easily spot weak applications or discrepancies without outright rejecting a candidate.

The Judging dashboard was designed to require minimal setup or knowledge of the platform. It strips out a lot of the complexity and private data available to the admins and simply mimics an email inbox. The metaphor has helped streamline judging and shortlisting sessions since judges can collaborate simultaneously, leave notes and scores, and nothing falls through the cracks during shortlisting sessions.

Important conversations still happen offline. Candidates amend applications, judges suggest alternate categories, statuses or notes need updating. Awardist can handle this in bulk and wrangle the data into a predictable format for the team to gather insights like: how many nominees reference a sponsor? The sponsor gets better visibility to their impact, not only from their submissions, but also from other programmes they might be working with.