The Top 3 Awards Management Software for Universities and Research Institutions
Academic progress and competition go hand in hand. Just think about it. We tap into rankings when we’re looking to choose the best college, work in teams or individually to outperform our classmates, and compete against thousands of other students to win a scholarship. This makes the culture of rivalry intrinsic to the modern education.
Seventy-one percent of students claim that competition in the classroom has a positive impact on their learning outcomes. The question is, how do you motivate students to use competition as a channel for learning? Whether it’s a team project or an individual online contest, efficient competition starts with the use of efficient tools. Awards management software is one such tool as an all-purpose instrument that helps power competition-driven projects at universities and research institutions. Basically, these are the tools that help educators manage grants, scholarships, abstract submissions, and international student contests all in one place.
Since the market of contest management solutions is booming, it takes a lot of time and energy to choose the optimal software. In this blog post, we offer you three options that all demonstrate a good balance of functionality, price, and usability.
Why academic institutions should use awards management software
Think back to any scholarship or student contest you’ve ever participated in. No matter what the size of the event was, you surely had to tackle a range of tasks, from uploading your submission documents to results tracking. And that’s only one application we are talking about here! If you add the tasks of other participants, judges, reviewers, and organisers to the list, you’ll have a big challenge on your hands. Research organisations and scholarship organisers face hundreds of such challenges throughout the year. Using awards management software (AMS) is inevitable because it takes the majority of tasks related to submissions and judging management from an organisation and helps educators focus on the results.
The problems that award management software can solve
With a focus on a “less work, more gain” approach, an awards management software helps academic organisations reduce their workloads. Mainly, if your university uses AMS, you can forget about the following pain points:
- Your research institution has its own academic database, and you want contest participants to use it.
AMS Solution: If your contest management system has good integration capabilities, you can easily align it with the database or any third-party tools through an open API.
- You need to interact with over 1,000 applicants throughout the event.
AMS Solution: Most software have an integrated email module that helps you accelerate interaction with applicants and judges through the use of pre-made templates, automated notifications, and email scheduling.
- You need to ensure submitted files don’t get lost in the shuffle.
AMS Solution: The defining feature of any awards management software is the possibility to submit and collect applications on one platform without any switching across platforms.
- Your organisation runs grants, scholarships, and abstract campaigns. For each of these, a different judging mechanism is used.
AMS Solution: With AMS, you get fully configurable experiences through the tools, including judge assignment, criteria management, coordinated submission tracking, and more.
- There is a need to develop dedicated websites for each of your awards campaigns.
AMS Solution: Although many people still think of coding whenever they hear about website development, there are actually many great awards management systems that you can use without having any technical background.
The 3 best award management software solutions for universities and research institutions
In our research, we focused on the processes that lie at the core of grants and scholarship management. Capabilities for managing large amounts of data and flexible judging modes were the key determining factors in this case. Here are three tools that proved to be good fits:
One hundred percent configurability, an excellent public voting module, smart reporting, and analytics—these are only a few of the perks that Judgify awards management software delivers. The strongest benefit of Judgify is its highly functional judging toolkit. Apart from a standard functionality package, this software boasts unique modules like judge abstention, the creation of custom shortlists, and the management of groups of judges.
In terms of submissions, Judgify supports diverse formats, from video to prototyping materials. Check out the case study of GridMarkets Scholarship, powered by Judgify, here.
Features:
- Landing page customisation
- Custom review criteria
- Submission collation
- Viewing, filtering, and moderating submissions
- Groups of reviewers
- Automated reviewer assignment
- Reviewer abstention
- Flexible configuration of fees
- Financial and submission reports
The mission of OpenWater is to create a toolkit that can be customised for any type of awards project. Currently, the software is used to manage grants, scholarships, board nominations, fellowships, grants, and prizes. For institutions that power different types of awards, OpenWater could be a good choice.
As for the core features, OpenWater has a great module for multi-step application review. By supporting reduced administrative load, the platform helps research organisations minimize time and cost investment.
Features:
- Awards website builder
- Centralised submissions portal
- Flexible judging and scoring tools
- Data analytics
- Pre-made reports
- Workflow management
CadmiumCD is a grant management software for research institutions and universities. Abstracts, awards, and grants are the target event formats that the system supports. Based on three stages of event organisation, CadmiumCD has separate toolkits for pre-event, during the event, and post-event management. The full cycle is managed in three simple steps: document submission, evaluation of submissions by reviewers, and selection of the best presentations based on results.
Features:
- Intuitive platform
- Selection of informational fields from a variety of options
- Preview of submissions before submitting
- Centralised platform for evaluation
- Mobile event app
- Content production and distribution modules
Conclusion
Whether it’s grants management software for research administration or a simple tool for automated judging that’s needed, there is a huge array of solutions out there. Our list of the top three AMS out there should help you understand how you can measure the quality of a platform based on functionality assets and usability.