How to Plan Your Awards Selection Process: Judging, Rounds & Criteria

Common Mistakes

When crafting your competition, you’re likely to focus more on the next actionable step (submissions opening, for instance) and less on the processes that come afterwards. Doing so will likely lead to problems later on. Here are a couple of examples:

• Missing data to allow you to make your selection
• Applications not fitting your exact needs. This usually means your purpose and goals weren’t clearly communicated from the start
• Processing too many heavy applications in too little time
• Judges finding it difficult to score so many unexpected entries

Focusing on your selection first saves you hours of firefighting later and gives everyone a better experience.

Working backwards

When planning your new programme, work backwards through your process. Start with what kind of candidate will be successful and work back towards the process of submitting. To reap the benefits of foresight, you need to do so before you launch your programme.

Questions worth asking yourself, in order, are:

• What criteria do you need for someone to be successful?
• How are you going to select them? (number of rounds, for instance)
• When are you going to pick successful candidates?
• Who is going to pick successful candidates? (and in which round?)
• What information do you need from candidates to make your selection?

Getting this information right from the start is crucial. Learn more about what to ask for when candidates submit.

When should each judging stage happen?

Timing your selection process realistically prevents bottlenecks. For a programme receiving 1,500 entries:

• Initial review (compliance check): 1-2 weeks after submissions close
• Round 1 (internal team): 2-3 weeks to filter 1,500 down to 200
• Round 2 (external panel): 3-4 weeks for detailed review of top 200
• Final decision: 1 week for discussion and confirmation
• Total: 7-10 weeks from submission deadline to announcement

First-time programmes often underestimate how long it will take them. If you think judging will take four weeks, plan for six. Rushed judging leads to poor decisions and burnt-out judges with a bitter taste left in their mouths.

Calculating effort

The more popular your opportunity is, the more effort it will be to make your selection. If this is your first, it may be hard to model how many submissions you’ll get. Planning for the most demanding scenario will allow you to cope regardless of the success of your competition.

Calculate judging effort in four steps:

Absolutely. 15 days of pure processing sounds absurd. That’s why you have rounds to process entries quicker at the start.

Knowing how long processing the maximum amount of applications will take allows you to plan for sufficient time. This may push you to rethink your process to reduce the time taken to go through each application. If you’re drowning in spreadsheets, explore modern tools for managing submissions that can cut processing time by 60% to 80%.

Filtering in Rounds

You may need to seriously consider selecting candidates across rounds if you:

• Expect more than a couple of hundred submissions
• Want to guarantee the quality of the submissions going onto your judges
• Wish to allow your community to help choose winners
• Need to manually check entries fulfil specific criteria before moving them onto the next stage
• Want to mix all the above (you could have a round for each if you need it)

As already covered above, it can take a long time to process submissions. Breaking your decision making into rounds allows you to reduce the time taken processing applications in earlier rounds and spending more time per submission in later rounds. An ideal structure for large programmes.

Keep earlier round light touch, selecting entries in seconds instead of minutes, focusing high level judges efforts on the best entries later on.

What about timelines?

Once you have established if you want any rounds, draft a quick timeline of dates in your process. Remember to give your judges and yourselves plenty of time. A three-round structure might look like: Round 1 (2 weeks, yes/no decisions, internal team), Round 2 (3 weeks, scoring out of 10, mixed panel), Round 3 (3 weeks, detailed criteria, external experts). Total: 8 weeks judging time.

What needs to be submitted

Asking for large amounts of information when people submit will seriously slow down your selection process. Asking for too little could make it hard for you to differentiate successful candidates.

Rethink what information you need from candidates and keep it to an absolute minimum whilst allowing you to make a meaningful decision. You may also wish to hide answers to specific questions from judges to lighten their loads.

Hiding information from judges

Not every field candidates complete needs to reach your judges. You might collect demographic data for reporting but hide it during judging to reduce bias. Common fields to consider hiding:

• Educational background (can create elitism)
• Age or career stage (for “emerging talent” definitions)
• Location (when unnecessary for selection)
• Organisation name (in early rounds)
• Marketing data (where did you hear about us…)

Modern award management platforms let you control precisely what each judge sees at each stage. Use this to keep early rounds focused and fast (fewer fields to review) whilst revealing more context in finals when deeper evaluation matters.

If you expect many submissions, a good rule is to keep the process lighter for earlier rounds and gradually go into more detail for later rounds.

Inviting Judges

Inviting judges allow you to:

• Share the workloads internally at earlier rounds
• Reduce bias by having multiple people help with the selection
• Inspire candidates to submit with big names linked to your competition
• Represent your community in your selection process

Including members of your organisation and partners in earlier rounds allows you to open dialogue around the work submitted to your programme. People will often feel proud to be asked and enjoy experiencing the impact of the programme you’re running.

Getting external members of your communities and more recognisable names to take part is particularly useful for later rounds. You should not be using their time to qualify hundreds of submissions (checking compliance, meeting specific criteria, and so on); instead, you should aim to capture their individual opinions on the best entries submitted.

Remember, inviting external judges requires a very clear ask. Do not swamp them with work. Be sure to have a round before theirs so you can control the number of submissions they will have to go through. Need help securing those big names? Our guide on approaching judges for competitions covers exactly what to say and when.

Judges appreciate platforms where they can see their progress (“You’ve scored 24 of 50 entries,” for instance), save draft scores, and access entries on any device. These seemingly small features make the difference between a judge completing their allocation on time versus abandoning halfway through. When approaching external judges, being able to say “our platform makes judging take 30 minutes instead of 3 hours” dramatically improves acceptance rates.

If paying judges, rounds let you control costs. Three internal staff reviewing 1,500 entries at Round 1 costs far less than five external experts each paid £500 doing the same work.

Judging criteria

Having judges is one thing. Making sure the judges know what is required of them is another. What should the judges be looking at when making their decision? What makes for a successful candidate?

Drafting a shortlist of criteria and how important they are in your decision-making process will allow you to formalise how you will select successful candidates. Criteria could be:

• A simple Yes, No, Maybe
• A total score out of ten
• A sum of scores relating to specific criteria (eight points for Originality, twelve for Execution, thirty for Purpose, and so on)

Remember that each decision you ask a judge to make will slow the process down, so try to keep criteria to a minimum in earlier rounds (Yes/No/Maybe, for instance) and allow for richer criteria in the later rounds (a score out of 10 for Originality, Execution, Purpose). A good rule of thumb is 5 is an ideal maximum amount of criteria (8 at a push).

Another benefit of knowing your criteria before your submissions open is that you can share them in your guidelines allowing candidates to make submissions that better match your requirements.

Anonymous selection

Making entries anonymous is a great way to reduce judges bias. It is worth noting that this is only really relevant where the artist does not feature in their work (performance, self-portraiture, etc.) and requires to think carefully about what the candidate will be submitting.

Ensure all information that can identify the candidate is not made available to judges. You may also want to warn candidates as they submit to make sure things like artist statements do not include information that could directly identify them.

Public Vote

Public voting can give your communities a voice, but it can also end up being a popularity contest. Depending solely on candidates to share a link to vote for their work will likely measure how sociable a candidate is, not the merits of their application.

If you wish to capture the voices of specific communities, you will need to actively drive public votes through these groups yourself. This requires carefully planned communications with all your stakeholders during the voting period (judges, partners, community groups, etc.).

You might also consider a sign or screen to remind people to vote as they visit your building (if you have a physical space).

It is also worth noting that rewarding the candidate chosen by the public with large cash prizes will incentivise them to cheat. The rise of increasingly sophisticated click farms makes catching cheaters increasingly hard.

Balance the incentives for the winners of the public vote. They should be valuable enough for the candidates to take part but not enough to pay for a click farm with their winnings. To put this in perspective, a thousand likes on Instagram cost as little as $50.

When to open public voting

Timing matters. Open voting too early (whilst submissions are still coming in), and late entrants get fewer votes simply because they had less time. Open it too close to results announcement, and people won’t engage.

Best practice: Close submissions, take 1-2 weeks for initial judging to filter obvious non-qualifiers, then open a 2 week public voting window on your strongest entries. This gives everyone equal exposure time whilst ensuring your audience votes on quality work rather than sifting through hundreds of unvetted entries. Announce voting results separately from judged awards if using both methods.

Public votes are also a great way of building subscribers to your newsletter, but be sure the platform you use is GDPR compliant (opt in!).

Conclusion

Thinking about how you will make your selection too late in your process is likely to lead to issues that will waste a huge amount of your time later on. In the worst of cases, it could lead to souring relationships with your candidates, judges and stakeholders.

Each minute planning your selection saves ten later. It’s the difference between a smooth process where candidates, judges, and stakeholders all leave happy versus a stressful scramble that damages relationships and your reputation.

Worth the upfront investment? Absolutely.

Your selection process is just one piece of the puzzle – see how it fits into the complete guide to managing submissions.