Change Log 1/1/24

If you have been using our website in the past, please pay attention to these notes as we have made significant changes as to how the platform operates.

General Platform Changes

• The platform is no longer a single website, instead it is now comprised of our primary domain, a separate and gated content management system and individual client websites.
• The client websites can now be indexed by search engines, which should improve traffic to events and awards programs.
• Personal profiles and portfolios have been removed from the system, as they were not consistent with the services we were trying to offer.
• Scholarships/grants have been temporarily removed from the platform as they will be re-integrated into awards programs in a few months.
• Elections have been removed, and can now be run by creating a survey instead. A survey is a free service that is a great option for requesting member or public feedback about events or awards programs.
• Organizations that have connected their Square account with us for payment processing will need to revoke the connection and reauthorize it if they intend to use our platform for selling tickets to any event as the system requires a new right granted by the approval. This is not required if the organization chooses only to run awards programs.

Awards Programs

• Contests have been renamed to awards programs.
• An SEO block is provided for administrators to offer a 'meta-description' tag for better search engine indexing.
• Coordinators no longer have separate administrative rights over awards programs or events. Instead they are simply displayed as a point of contact on the awards program landing page.
• Sponsors can now be added directly to awards programs, and can be set either as a single group or on a tiered basis (platinum, gold, etc).
• Non-category items have been renamed to optional fees.
• Administrators can now attach a ticketed event to their awards program landing page. The purpose is for driving traffic back and forth between awards programs and celebration gala ticket sales pages.
• Administrators can now send emails to entrants with incomplete entries or judges with incomplete scores through the notification system.
• Scoresheets can only be attached to a single category at a time.
• The winners' gallery has been redesigned as a single page, and no longer contain links to back to an entrant's profile page as those have been removed.

Request Volunteers

• The request volunteer section now will permit searching based on type of specialization as well as for members of selected organizations.
• When searching for volunteers, the response will contain all possible results and will no longer just be limited to only 10 items. It will however be shuffled to prevent the same 5-10 judges getting all of the requests.
• When asking a volunteer to help, the volunteer is added to a 'Prospective Judges' list where administrators can record helpful notes and then directly convert them as a judge when they are ready.

Registration Page

• Members-only pricing no longer requires the purchaser to be flagged as a member of the organization in our system. There is now a toggle to activate it where the purchaser agrees that they are a member or not, and paying member pricing in bad faith could result in disqualification or lack of refund.

Entry Submission Process

• The entry submission process has been nearly completely redesigned.
• The submission process now actually has a submit button. Entrants are required to step through the submission flow to the 'Review' page, and then submit the entry. If they make any changes afterwards, the entry is no longer considered submitted and has to be re-submitted by the entrant.
• Co-contributors have been removed from the platform. Entry submissions now instead have a field where the entrant is required to provide the name(s) that should receive any award.
• The progress bar has been removed.
• Captions can now be added to PDF documents.
• Forms can be saved even though they are incomplete or invalid. The entry cannot be submitted until everything is complete, however.
• Downloadable files can now be attached to document folders. This will cause the file to appear on the page when the entrant is trying to submit into a folder. We received a lot of concerns where entrants were looking for a certain file, and this should resolve that issue completely.
• The entire page now looks and works far better on a mobile device.

Entry Scoring Process

• Judges can now see the number of points they have submitted for an entry. Their entry list can also now be filtered based on entry number or total number of points given.
• Judges can now jump directly the next entry in their list without having to return to the list first. Saving scores no longer automatically transitions them back to the list.
• Administrators can now enable public voting as an option. This feature allows any user to cast one vote per device for either their favorite submission per category, or top three per category. We are planning to enhance this based on user feedback.
• Public voting and scoring by judge can be run simultaneously and will generate different results administrators can take into account before assigning awards.
• The entire page now looks and works far better on a mobile device.

Events

• Events are now paid services whereas a small percentage fee is deducted from any transaction we process for a ticket sale. Free tickets do not incur this additional cost. This is consistent with and generally less expensive than competing services.
• Coordinators no longer have separate administrative rights over awards programs or events. Instead they are simply displayed as a point of contact on the awards program landing page.
• An SEO block is provided for administrators to offer a 'meta-description' tag for better search engine indexing.
• Non-ticket items have been renamed to optional fees.
• Images can be uploaded to an event which will display as a slideshow on the event's landing page.
• Administrators can now attach an awards program to their event landing page. The purpose is for driving traffic back and forth between awards programs and celebration gala ticket sales pages.

Surveys

• Surveys are a new and free service for administrators to create any type of form and request any type of information.
• Organization elections can be easily configured to run as a survey, and we strongly encourage their use for this purpose. In fact, we encourage liberal use of our surveying system to further engage with users so that we can all improve our products and experiences.