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Project Overview
Award Force is the next generation SaaS awards management application that delivers a great awards experience for entrants, judges and awards organisers.
Seasoned awards organisers know there’s a lot to manage during an awards programme from accepting entries, taking payments, validating eligibility, organising & matching judges to entries, collating input and scores across multiple rounds of judging, shortlist to winner selection, and solid support and communication through the whole process.
Award Force was designed from the ground up to deliver a robust online solution for awards, that’s a joy to use.
Organisation
Team
Technical Lead: Kirk Bushell
Developer: Jason Morton
Developer: Tim Sheehan
DevOps Engineer: James Hebden
UX/UI Designer: Tomoko Iwai
Project Brief
Awards management presents lots of challenges: dealing with volumes of awards participants of varying technical proficiency; collecting sensitive entry information, documents and data in volume; accurate tallying and reporting on score data; exporting the results for a breadth of purposes. Getting any of these wrong is potentially disastrous for a reputable awards programme.
Awards organisers each have their own unique nomination, entry & judging processes. Awards credibility hinges on the sponsors, participants and judges that the organisers attract and the values and brands they create—all leading to a demanding set of needs and requirements.
Technology agency Tectonic Digital set out to address these challenges with a B2B2C white label web application that is differentiated by it ease-of-use, reliability and security. That app is Award Force, launched commercially in late 2013 to a receptive market.
Project Need
The business of running awards is an old one. The information intensive processes of collecting, managing and judging entries is administration intensive and time demanding. Moving the end-to-end process online is a clear win to streamline processes whilst reducing effort and the potential for mistakes.
Award Force innovates by addressing the challenges of the awards business with leading edge technology and a great customer experience, evolving best practice in the field.
Leading edge technology use includes:
- The application is responsive, facilitating use on any device with a browser, from desktop to tablet and smartphone (increases flexibility for awards organiser processes, e.g. mobile judging)
- Backend built in the Laravel Framework, "The PHP framework for web artisans" providing a JSON web service for a dynamic front end built with AngularJS by Google—the "Superheroic JavaScript MVW framework" (makes for a slick, snappy interface)
- Fully cloud-based and scalable hosting stack on Amazon Web Services (contributes to a stable and reliable platform)
Customer experience and service innovations driving best practice in the field:
- Entrants can edit and update their entry right up to the entry deadline (significantly reduces organiser support effort)
- Awards entries auto-save in the background during creation and editing (significantly increases entrant comfort and happiness)
- No crash guarantee—hearing of organiser frustrations with other online systems crashing under deadline period load, we architected our system to scale with load, offering a guarantee that it won’t crash under pressure (significantly reduces organiser stress levels)
User Experience
Award Force users comprise awards entrants, judges and organisers. They all access the same application for an awards programme with a secure login and consistent user-interface that provides role-based system access. As a white-label app, the interface is themed to beautifully complement each awards organiser’s brand.
We like to say to awards organisers “Your entrants and judges already know how to use it”. The Award Force user interface and experience is crafted to be so straightforward to use there's no need for instructions or a manual for judges and entrants—they just need the web address! Fewer support calls from entrants and judges saves organisers time and money.
We’ve achieved this with a clean and careful, user-centred approach to the interface design, and a commitment to continuous improvement. We’re always watching, listening and monitoring for problem areas or points of confusion with the user interface and regularly releasing improvements.
For awards organisers, checking and administering entries, payments and judges can be time consuming and repetitive. To alleviate this, we’ve designed interfaces and processes to simplify tasks and reduce steps. We’ve done this by listening to awards organisers and putting ourselves in their shoes to understand how and what they do to run their awards. We’ve also utilised leading edge web application technologies (see details above) to create a dynamic snappy interface that’s quick to use for repetitive tasks.
Project Marketing
Award Force reaches its customers through a combination of SEO, SEM and direct marketing. As a niche B2B application, Award Force has a clearly identifiable audience which particularly suits direct marketing strategies.
Since commercial launch in late 2013, these marketing activities have attracted customers across a spectrum of industries including government, advertising, marketing, media, entertainment, journalism, architecture, design and education.
Further, delivering outstanding service and a great product has the benefit of good word-of-mouth, which has lead to referrals between awards organisers.
Project Privacy
The Award Force system has been designed and built with advanced security features for the protection and integrity of user data and the system environment.
To protect the privacy of individuals, Award Force:
- Stores Personally Identifiable Information (PII) *encrypted*
- Uses one-way encryption to store passwords
- Uses SSL for the entire application, using 256-bit security certificates
- Does not store any credit card information
Line of Business
The category relates to applications that aid productivity in Line of Business.
More Details