Once you've set up your contest or competition and submissions have started to come in, you'll want to manage these submissions following the steps below. Depending on how your contest is set up, you may follow these steps in different orders...
1. Manage the First Round of Reviews
When submissions start coming in:
All your submissions will automatically feed into the first Stage you have created and listed as "New" submissions.
Anyone in the admin team can view these submissions at any time, and some teams find it useful to start an internal review process as soon as submissions start coming in to qualify which submissions have enough potential to make it further in the contest.
You may want to set up a "first round rejected" stage (or something similar) and any submissions that won't make the next round can be moved into this stage. At this point, moving submissions into this stage won't notify the creator, but is a useful tool to start getting organised! You will be able to send a bulk rejection message to these creators when the contest ends.
Please note that if setting up a rejected stage, make sure that the creator-facing status is correctly set up so that it isn't displaying a rejected status before the contest has closed.
2. Send submissions to your Review Panel
You'll want to start sending submissions to your review panel. To do this,
Head to the Stages section and send submissions for review. This will then send all the submissions in that Stage to the designated Review Panel you have assigned.
Each member of the dedicated review panel will then receive submissions into their dedicated Review Account, ready for them to start working through.
3. Evaluate the Reviews
After your review panel has reviewed the submissions, you'll see all of their voting, scoring or comments recorded in each of the submissions.
You and your team (with the correct permissions) will be able to work through each of the submissions and see an average of the scores, a voting preference and read all of the comments.
You'll then be able to decide on whether to progress the submission or not. If not, you'll want to move it to a rejected stage you will have created (by changing the stage in the submission), and if it's a yes, you'll want to move it to the next round.
4. Move to the Next Round
You may also want to move all of the submissions in one stage to another.
Use the Bulk Move feature to do this. For example, once you have made a first pass at some entries and moved some to rejected, you may want to advance the remaining successful submissions to the next stage (e.g., from First Review to Shortlist).
5. Send Out Messages
Once you have made decisions on your submissions, you'll want to communicate this to your entrants. After all the submissions are correctly in the desired stage:
Use the Bulk Message feature to send a message to each entrant in that stage.
Create a template in advance that you can use to send to all and re-use in the future. You should create different templates for different stages (e.g a rejection, a shortlisted or a successful template).
Once the template is loaded, you can always tweak it accordingly before sending.
Remember to set the ability of whether those creators can reply to your message or not before sending. You may want to disable replies for rejections, for example, to stop unwanted replies.
6. Repeat for Each Round
For multi-round contests:
Create a new stage and assign a new review panel for each round.
Continue using Bulk Move and Bulk Message to keep the process running smoothly.
Repeat this process until you reach your final round.
7. Select and Announce Winners
Once your final review panel has made their decisions:
Move winning entries to the Winner Selected stage.
Notify winners and other participants via Bulk Message.
You can also publish the results on your website!
Tip
Keep your timeline and communication consistent. Make sure to share important dates, review phases, and announcement details early so participants know what to expect.