The OpenWater Blog

New Judging Improvements Are Here!

Last month we released some highly requested improvements to our judging interface to make life easier for awards program admins, judges, and entrants alike.

Mass Judge Emails!

This has been our #1 most requested feature and we are glad to say we’ve finally brought it out to all clients. For this release we’ve focused on the most common requested workflows:

• Send Email to All Judges
• Send Email to Those who have Never Logged In
• Send Email to Those who have some incomplete assignments left
• Send Email to Those who have done all you’ve asked

That second email leads me to our next feature:

Judge Activation and Login Dates

We now track the last login date for entrants, judges, and admins. Also, gone are the days of assigning a random password to judges for their first login. If a judge has never logged in, you’ll have the opportunity to send them an activation email which will let them create a password on the first attempt.

The activation emails can be sent in bulk too which means you can do all of your prep and then blast out an email to all judges.

Expediting Judge Scoring

Prior to this update, dealing with judging changes was a labor intensive process. A judge suddenly falls sick and you need to move his / her incomplete assignments over to someone else? It used to take 3-4 clicks PER assignment.

With this update we’ve added a few helpful features

• Clear Unfinished Assignments as stated will clear out the judge assignments for all judges in one click
• Finalize All Draft Scores will set the scores for judges who “Saved a Draft” of their scores but never marked their results as final.
• Reassign Incompletes will allow you to move unfinished entries to another judge
• Add More presents a quick shortcut to the Bulk Assignment screen with this judge pre-selected

Force Judges to Rank Entries

Some programs might want judges to shortlist a handful of entries. With the latest improvements we now let you allow a judge to only give each entry in a category a unique score. In other words if you want them to rank their top 5 entries, you can allow them to specify which is 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 without allowing them to give two entries the same score.

Show Winner Status / Judge Scores to the Entrants

We’ve heard from our admins that entrants are always clamouring to find out what the judges have said about them. Often you want to provide this data, but it is a pain to distribute and anonymize. But not anymore! 

In the advanced configuration section (where you define open / close dates), we’ve added a few settings to show scores, comments, and winner information.  

We’re really excited to have all of these features rolled out to make all you admins out there have a smoother experience.

Kunal Johar

Kunal Johar is the OpenWater platform evangelist. He currently manages our development teams and enjoys diving into the fray. Find him in our community chat room.

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