How to Invite Judges to Your Awards Contest

Finding awards judges and then having to invite judges to awards events sometimes is not as easy as it seems it ought to be. It’s great when you have a crowd of industry experts to choose from as judges, but what if you don’t? In this case, you should get ready to send out invitations to potential judges for various events: competitions, conferences, teambuilding, awards, and contests. There should always be someone to watch the process, vote, and decide on the winners during the contest awards.

Ways to invite judges

The basic principles of event organisation and management consider choosing judges as a special type of management. A strategy for selecting event judges and the development of a model for their financial or other motivation can be created to achieve success in any awards contest. But before this is done, decide how you will invite the most suitable judge for your event.

The modern-day event industry allows for several ways to find and invite qualified judges:

• Via e-mail
• With a printed invitation
• Through an event judging module
• All of the above-mentioned ways at the same time

Thus, you can create an invitation letter/e-mail asking potential judges to preside at your awards contest.

Writing an invitation letter

A timely invitation to the judge is a prerogative of a successful awards contest. The official engagement email allows you to inform judges about the event, such as where and when it will take place, and provides information that will help them decide whether they will accept the invitation.

As a rule, an official letter to invite judges is created for such events as an awards ceremony, contest, teambuilding event, official corporate event, etc.

While in everyday life invitations most often come in oral form, in business communications it is always more acceptable to send an invitation letter when asking someone to act as a judge. That type of letter differs in style from other types of written correspondence.

Here are a few examples:

And here’s another one:

Searching for judges and writing invitation letters are especially important issues when organising academic events, events for scientific research organisations, or contests for schools.

How to invite judges on stage and what you can offer

If you’re looking for new ways to increase judge engagement in your event, before you invite someone to judge it, you should first think of what you can offer them in exchange. You should also prepare a new letter with information about the awards, rules, and judges’ roles for the awards and confirm other important information before the judging takes place.

Acknowledging judge acceptance

During your contest, how you motivate an awards judge, the rules of judging, and getting material benefits from the organisation by choosing the right people to act as judge are all quite important.

It is also important to have a clear idea of what requirements your judges will have. In turn, a person who is going to judge should have clear reasons for taking on this role at your awards contest.

You should also prepare a letter for new judges with information about awards, rules, judges’ roles in the awards, etc. In these rules, it should be clearly and strictly defined what the judging process is as well as what it is not through the use of negative examples with generalising.

From here, through participation in competitions and the analysis of the estimates in comparison with the estimates of the other organisers’ experiences from previous performances, the work of the judges is evaluated.

Let us also remind you that judges may be invited from other areas, but they should be fairly close to your industry. Consequently, most of the time, future jury members judge on the problems of their own business or academic activities, and even if they have attended two or three judicial seminars, this does not mean they will confidently use the concepts and criteria they know in your unique event.

And of course, they may even make mistakes in their judgments at awards competitions.

Information to confirm before judging

Certain data will need to be provided and checked out by the judges before the contest starts. You should also provide your judges with important event security concepts in the description of the requirements for their speeches (if any), such as rules and judging requirements, criteria, and ceremony categories. This should all be included in the content of their awards invitation letter, their evaluation, etc.

Less significant changes will affect the adjustment of the distribution of points according to the criteria. In addition to introducing the concepts of security and the terms and conditions of fair judging, no other significant changes should be made to the rules.

This implies one of the main reasons for possible dissatisfaction with the assessments when analysing the final protocols. Unfortunately, few people think about the true causes of their discontent. Often judges may be in a hurry to blame the organisers for their mistakes, accusing them of unfair judging arrangements, poor management, weak data processing, or distorting the results. However, modern judging platforms allow you to avoid the majority of such problems by minimising the human factor for both the judges and the organisers.

To receive good work from the judges, the following is necessary:

• Reaffirm all the data beforehand.
• Make sure they are used to filling in the online forms or protocols correctly.
• They should be familiar with the rating scales as well as the assessment steps.
• They will need to align their ideas with the scheme given by the organisers.
• Set up the platform, and provide the registration link.
• Get them enlisted manually for offline judging.
• Remind them of the categories and criteria.
• Be ready to follow up.

The judges will have to get used to how all of these points are accumulated during the evaluation of the first few rounds if they’re new, and experienced judges must do everything flawlessly right away. Everything depends on the organisers: how much they have thought over the judging technology, how it is working in an unusual environment, how convenient it is to use the tools that they have been provided with, and so on.

The current technology of judging is based on the following simple provisions:

• The judge is an outsider who does not have a significant practice of working in contests.
• The judge is an ordinary person and is therefore not able to grasp complex scales of assessments in a short period of time.
• The judge’s working conditions should be as comfortable as possible: All protocols are designed so that they are readable in a dark room so that they can rate all assessments, the online forms should be easy to understand, etc.
• With both online and offline awards judges, everything that can be calculated by a computer must be done by a computer.
• All assessment criteria should be clearly and simply described in one sentence, clearly limiting the scope of the application.
• The judge should not be faced with the need to judge exceptional cases or individual issues.
• The criteria should not be described using vague phrases.

Every event manager should think outside of the box by looking for new ways to increase the engagement of event judges and get the maximum out of the event by choosing the right people to judge.

Conclusion

Now that you are aware of how to invite judges and what you can offer them, what conditions to set up, and what outcome to expect, it will be easier to organise your event’s judging process in the best possible way with the help of Judgify.

Also, feel free to sign up at Judgify’s contest management solution to use our judges invitation templates to invite your judges and use our tips and tools. Feel free to leave your own suggestions in the comments below. Good luck with your event!