While Mitt’s bragging about binders full of women, we’re eliminating binders full of awards! We may be a little late jumping on the political joke bandwagon, but it was hard to resist. We’ve actually been thinking about binders a lot lately after one of our clients approached us looking for help. In the past, having an awards program was a hassle for associations. Without technology, coordinators were buried in paperwork between nominations, fees, and–of course–binders. This particular association received so many binders each year they began setting aside an office during awards season designated solely for storage. When they approached us with this problem, we used awardsCMS to transition the process to a virtual space–unlimited and completely accessible. The judges no longer have to get together to shift through the pages of countless binders; they can log-on from anywhere and judge based on set criteria, eliminating another problem our client had: arbitrary scoring.
How can you translate between a 10-point scale, a letter grade, a 15.24-scale, and a check system? The obvious answer is you can’t. But the online technology changes the game, so you don’t have to. The judges for our client’s awards program were given strict judging rules, forcing them to submitting the scores the same way. We have a similar system to avoid incomplete forms. With required fields the nominators can’t submit an unfinished application. This was a huge relief for the awards program coordinator who in previous years would spend hours on the phone contacting nominators to fill in missing information. Another client of ours was having a terrible time keeping track of the checks–people had to resubmit their nomination fee so many times that many would cancel the nomination. We set up an online payment system for them with awardsCMS; a nomination can not be submitted without the payment which is automatically recorded and immediately associated with the correct file. The perfect solution!
So maybe binders and paperwork work for politicians, but they don’t work for us or for our clients.