The OpenWater Blog

Feature Spotlight: Open/Close Categories

Organizations today, yours likely included, have a lot of categories in their awards programs. Doing so attracts a wider range of entrants, boosts organizational prestige, and grows your organization as a whole. However, more categories can add layers of complication to the call for entry and other related processes in your program.

OpenWater’s Open/Close Categories feature allows you to treat each category individually. This means that regardless of when categories need to close or how long others need to kept open, you can do it all. The feature is particularly useful if some of your categories require physical mailing and others don’t. With the feature, you can shut down physical mailing categories sooner to ensure you receive all entries on time while leaving remaining categories open.

Read on to learn:

• Unique applications of the Open/Close Categories feature; and
• How to enable the feature in your OpenWater software

Use Case: Nationwide Children’s Hospital

The Open/Close Categories feature doesn’t have to be used strictly for entry collection, as is evidenced by Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s use of the platform! With demands for open and closed categories for both abstracts collection and conference registration, Nationwide takes advantage of this feature by ending the abstracts collection process while keeping registration open.

Doing so lends efficiency to their awards program as a whole and eliminates confusion from the process.

How to Enable the Feature in Your OpenWater Software

Using the Open/Close Categories feature is simple. By navigating to the Program Settings tab on the top bar of your dashboard, you will see “Categories” in the drop down menu. Select it and then select which category you want to disable.

At the bottom of the page, you’ll see a line that says “Prevent New Applications to Submit in this Category.” By selecting or deselecting the box, you can open or close categories as is needed. Once you do, entrants will see the categories on the dropdown menu but will be unable to select it.

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Streamline Your Program With Open/Close Categories

If you struggle to balance the availability of certain categories over others throughout your awards program, this free feature is available now in your OpenWater software. Use it today to maintain control over your entire program without using complicated strategies to do so!

Learn more about Open/Close categories and get a step-by-step tutorial of how to enable or disable categories in our Help Center!

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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