The OpenWater Blog

Innovative Use: How Red Tricycle Uses Galleries to Generate Value for Entrants

Every awards program has a major hurdle to success: Convincing entrants that a program is worth entering. After all, entrants are going to spend a significant amount of time, and often money, preparing and submitting an entry to any program.

Accordingly, they’ll want to know: What am I getting in return for all this work?

This is where some programs fall short. However, this is where you can stand out like Red Tricycle has in their innovative use of the OpenWater gallery feature.

Read on to learn:

• Why galleries are valuable to awards programs;
• How Red Tricycle uses their galleries; and
• Why OpenWater is the premier platform for gallery implementation and support

3 Reasons Why Your Awards Program Needs a Gallery (or Galleries)

As an awards program, you may choose to create an entrant gallery, finalist gallery, or winner gallery (or all three). Regardless of which you choose, there are 3 reasons why you should create at least one gallery for your program:

1. A gallery offers additional PR and exposure to those who enter and/or win your award.
2. A gallery boost prestige of your program by offering visitors and entrants a place to view the work that previous and current entrants have done in your industry.
3. A gallery highlights the best of what your program has to offer and gives entrants a concrete (ROI-driven) reason to enter.

With these benefits in mind, let’s turn to Red Tricycle and how they’ve customized the OpenWater gallery feature to create something even more valuable for their audience.

How Red Tricycle Customized the OpenWater Gallery

Red Tricycle customized their gallery by breaking down categories by region. This means that you use the selector to choose your region and then can choose a category to view the gallery relevant to you.

In the backend, you can see how the built-in filtering works. For example, the screenshot below depicts the National category for “Best of the Web” with all subcategories listed below.

This not only makes it easy to organize your galleries but makes it convenient for your entrants to find the category they’re interested in as well.

Here is what the gallery looks like from the front-end of the site:

Why OpenWater Works Best for Galleries

There are countless platforms that offer gallery functionality but OpenWater’s support and platform streamlines everything for an efficient experience for admins and entrants alike. With built-in social sharing, users can also post to all popular social networks to facilitate straightforward information sharing.

The customer support time at OpenWater holds your hand throughout the entire process as well. We’re here for you through the setup of the gallery, public voting process, and will assist with setting up the submission form and other elements that impact gallery configuration and structure.

Save Time, Money, and Energy With OpenWater’s Gallery Tool

With a unique twist of your own, you can manipulate the OpenWater gallery tool to suit your organization’s unique needs, just like Red Tricycle did.

Keep in mind that a gallery is yet another tool your organization needs to attract entrants and sustain growth. If you’re already on the OpenWater platform, this is an easy way to differentiate your site and your organization. So, which gallery will you build first?

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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