Members are the lifeblood of any industry association and without them they would cease to exist.
An association's primary objective is to support their members and provide them with the best opportunity to create sustainable and thriving businesses. Whether that is through industry advocacy, supporting services or promotional industry activities.
To help support the services that associations provide they need an ever increasing membership base and associated dues revenue to help drive these initiatives.
Many associations run awards to help promote the achievements of their members and provide an additional source of revenue. However their primary objective is also to grow its membership base. Let's face it, we would always more likely want to do business with an organisation who has achieved independent recognition as an outstanding performer by an association.
This is a key sales and marketing tool for members and is also one of the driving reasons for members to be a part of an association.
However many associations still rely on archaic solutions to manage their awards.
Many who are reading this very article may be saying to themselves, “no, we are good, we use google forms, file-share tools like drop box to capture images and email to communicate electronically with our members and adjudicators”.
If you are in this category, ask yourself how long do these awards take to set up? How do you manage payments? How do you set up the assignment and collection of scores from adjudicators? How do you select winners? How do you collate nominations and all associated information?
If you answered “manually” to any of these, then you have a great opportunity!
Doing things “manually” does not provide a seamless experience between nominees to adjudicators and creates a mountain of work collating, adding, communicating and organising logistics.
This stifles the ability for an association to scale the awards to reach the real goals they are set out to achieve.
This is why Launchpad6 is so focused on driving solutions that help Associations create a delightful experience for their current and prospective members, while also ensuring adjudicators have an enjoyable experience assessing nominees.
Members expect a guided experience to nomination applications. Simple things such as
Being able to submit all kinds of information and files in one form.
Having a guided application forms that dynamically show information that is relevant to their chosen award category.
Not having to complete an application at one time by being able to save as draft and come back.
Being able to submit with payment and receive notification when the application has been received and accepted.
By making it easy and delightful usually means more nominees and opportunity for exposure!
Often, forgotten people in the process are the adjudicators. Many are providing the adjudication service as a non-paid volunteer basis.
So it is important to make the process as efficient as possible as they most likely have other “paid” responsibilities they need to attend to.
Providing your adjudicators an experience such as:
Having a simple portal that has seamlessly allocated their nominees for review.
Simple adjudication that automatically collates and saves results.
Providing a simple way to review what they have done and how many assessments they have remaining.
Having a single portal with everything they need to make decisions and score including answers to questions and submitted videos, documents and images in one place.
Not only does it keep adjudicators volunteering year after year but it also ensures the most accurate results possible while the possibility of manual data handling errors.
And best of all this is all done with minimum administration.
No manual assignment.
No manual collation of scores,
No manual payment collection,
No manual communication,
No manual nominee and adjudicator management.
Just more time to promote and create great awards that your industry and most important, members will be proud of.
If this sounds like a journey you would like to take, then reach out to us at Launchpad6 and we will show you a new way of working.
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