How TAF doubled its entries and professionalized its association awards management with Evalato

With Harry Shackleton, Commercial Director at TAF

Founded in 1997 and comprising more than 170 trade associations, the Trade Association Forum (TAF) is the “association of associations” — encouraging the development and sharing of best practices among UK trade associations and promoting the role of effective trade associations to government, industry, and the wider public. 

In an effort to drive the standards of its members and raise the profile of the outstanding contribution of trade associations to UK society as a whole, TAF uses events, publications, research, and awards, with the latter being one of the major events of the year, and an opportunity to recognize the excellence of both organizations and individuals. 

Major pain points 

Prior to discovering Evalato, TAF faced a number of challenges organizing association awards, not in the least, having to ask people to send in submissions by email. The problems also included: 

• The necessity to collate the submissions 
• Efforts in preparing the submissions for the judges 
• A lot of staff time wasted in the process 
• Judges had to get together to go through the entries  

“It was a big job to get everything together and particularly for the judges involved quite a lot of management and organization to make sure all the files were in the right place with the entries and everyone knew what they were doing. So the difficulty was sort of the coordination and the waste of staff time in managing the process and also the judges obviously had a difficult job in finding everything they needed.” Harry Shackleton, Commercial Director at TAF
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How Evalato helped TAF with association awards management   

TAF implemented Evalato to streamline its awards program, enhancing the applicant and judging experience. Here are Evalato’s features that proved particularly beneficial to TAF: 

• In-built payments — TAF was able to collect the awards entries fees much more efficiently.

Evalato supports multiple currencies, payment methods, as well as custom billing and tax rules, along with special offers and discount functionalities, enabling users to efficiently monetize their awards program. 

• Option to approve applications — Evalato enabled TAF to approve applications much more easily and make sure that they featured all the right documentation before being put through to judging. This in turn made the process of forwarding the entries to the judges much smoother. 

Evalato’s customizable application process keeps awards organizers in charge, letting them decide when people can register, submit, edit, resubmit, or withdraw their applications.

• Scoring system — Evalato helped streamline the whole application administration process, from submission, through filtering and approving the entries for judging, while TAF’s judges could do everything online in their own time and evaluate at their own leisure.

Evalato empowers judging with multiple voting options, unlimited rounds, and a next-gen portal that lets judges vote at any time, from any device. 

“So, switching to Evalato helped us streamline the process and make us much more efficient in how we ran the awards. It also enabled us to collect the awards entries fees much more efficiently using the inbuilt payment software, so, overall it made the whole process much smoother and the judges also said back that it was much easier to use the system. [...] So, from the point of view of the people entering through to our process of administering it through to the judges it made everything much simpler and easier” Harry Shackleton, Commercial Director at TAF

Additionally, TAF has benefitted from Evalato’s enhanced category structure which has easily accommodated the awards’ 18 separate categories, covering everything from campaigning through to leadership and diversity, and inclusion, culminating in TAF’s headline award — Trade Association of the Year.

The results 

Using association awards management software made a huge difference for TAF, enabling them to collect 250-odd entries this year. Thanks to Evalato, TAF also enjoyed: 

• A near-100% rise in entries  
• Efficient collection of entry fees 
• Easier judging 
• Professionalizing the awards 

“Switching Evalato made the whole process much more efficient and easy to manage. We increased the entries into the Awards this year by almost 100% and it's also helped us as part of our drive to professionalize the awards and make them seem higher value.” Harry Shackleton, Commercial Director at TAF