LaunchPad6 is a competition management platform allowing you to create, personalise and manage contests and the judging process easily and efficiently. We decided that this would be the best solution for an event that recently launched, the Hack the Planet Competition 2021. Hack the Planet is an ideas competition for people from Commonwealth Nations. It is run by the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Satellite Applications Catapult.
To take part, competitors submit a proposal specifically addressing ocean challenges, with concepts that include the power of imagery, connectivity or other applications from satellites. The initial submission should give an overview of the idea, which if shortlisted would go through a two-month knowledge exchange programme where experts will help to shape and hone the ideas into a winning concept, with the potential to win £10,000 to help take the concept to the next level of execution.
Look and Feel
The platform is very user friendly and has a lot of customisable features to personalise the overall appearance. Both the participants and judges have access to a public portal URL where they can log in and access the relevant information. The URL itself can be customised to your own sub domain, making it unique to your event. There is the opportunity to upload a header image and welcome video, competition count down and useful information about the competition. Links can be embedded to redirect users to certain areas of the site and there are dedicated tabs across the top for easy navigation. These tabs can be changed depending on the content needed. The level of customisation is completely up to you but in this instance, we made it very visually appealing with large images from Satellite Catapult’s own photo store.
Entry Process
Perhaps the most important element of the competition is the entry process. We wanted to ensure that the form was simple for our audience which is spread across the Commonwealth. Due to the capability of LaunchPad6, we were able to customise the entry form so that entrants could answer the required questions as well as upload PDF documents and videos. The form includes some standard questions which can be enabled, and additional questions can be added and made mandatory or optional. There are multiple types of questions you can use such as text, dropdown, checkbox and uploads, meaning that the entry form is as customisable as you wish.
It’s important to highlight that each entrant must register for the event before they can move on to the entry form – otherwise they will not be able to see the form. We decided to add customised text and a button to the register page to navigate people to the correct pages.
Judging Process
Depending on the format of the competition, you can set up as many judging rounds as you need. To set up a round you must specify the dates that the round is live and build the judging criteria into the platform. There is no limit on the number of criteria that you can add, and it can also be weighted by individual criteria, so you are able to highlight if some elements are of higher importance in the scoring process. Total entry scores can either be a sum or average of all judges scores, and you are able to enable comments and the ability to edit scoring if you wish. Once the round is complete, the judges can be allocated to the submissions and the judges will be able to access only those entries for scoring. The dates allocated to the round will apply to the judges, they will not be able to score after the deadline unless an admin extends the date.
As an admin viewer you are able to see the progress on scoring at any stage once the round is live and once the deadline has passed the full list of scores is available to download.
Communication
Within the admin dashboard there is a notifications tab where automated email communications can be configured and enabled. There are a number of useful templates that can be set up such as entry received and approval emails, troubleshooting tips and password reset requests. There are lots of options for the email communications so you can personalise it as you wish with a header, links and email copy. The LaunchPad6 logo and disclaimer can also be removed to enhance the personalisation.
Analytics
Whilst the platform does not specifically offer downloadable reports, there is a dashboard that shows the number of registered users and some visual maps where the website visitors are located. We have found that this information is not particularly useful as it is not capturing the entries or showing many patterns. We can download both the total entries and registrations from the platform which can then be analysed using Pivot tables to create our own reporting. This shows personal data that we have captured during the registration process such as gender, age, and country which is subsequently used to determine which audiences the competition is capturing and helps to support further marketing within specific regions. The entry data shows all the fields that we capture in the entry form to ensure that attendees are completing the required fields.
If you have any events coming up, virtual or otherwise please get in touch with Outsourced Events via info@www.outsourcedevents.com and we would be happy to help.
*Disclaimer: This article expresses the views of Outsourced Events and was not paid for.
