We wanted to do a start-up contest for students. That meant that we needed a contest management software.
The first step was to search for a WP plugin that offered an end to end contest management. We did find a few but they needed integrations, or were missing some key functionality.
Next, we evaluated YouNoodle.
Younoodle was already the platform being used by another startup contest where I was on the jury. The UX was so bad that we put it in the negative list almost immediately.
After this, we came to the final step - yes, SaaS: An external platform that offers end to end contest management functionality.
Our key asks were:
A. Good UX, because this was for young students. We didn't want a data heavy, clunky UX.
B. Flexibility.
C. Ease of use
D. Privacy
E. Functionality - Assignment of Judges, Judges should be able to view and score online.
F. Admin should be able to assign judges, see when they have scored, who needs nudging, and download scores, etc.
G. User experience should be intuitive and easy.
In the end, it was between 2 platforms :
A. Dare2Compete
B. Judgify
Dare2Compete is a full fledged, feature-rich platform that caters to end to end contest management. The other thing that worked in favour of dare2compete was that it takes 3% processing fee for fees collected and also gives us access to its own native set of users. All events are manually checked by a review team before being approved, so that quality of contests available is also quite good.
Judgify.me, on the other hand, appears to be a more recent platform.
Eventually, we chose Judgify.me over Dare2compete. For those of you looking for a SaaS platform for contest management, this experience might be useful.
Our URL was simply judgify.me/empower. This is easy to remember. It was customisable. A friendly url makes a world of difference to user experience for participants.
The contest creation process at Dare2compete is very thorough. It is also long and does not allow us to save as draft. One event creation takes 30 minutes. It took 3 efforts to create a single event.
This, I thought, was a plus with Dare2compete.com. It builds the credibility of the platform. The review takes under 24 hours, and ensures that the quality of contests (and by extension, the quality of participants) we get is likely to be good. Judgify.me had no review process. Since we did not depend on the audience at judify.me, it did not impact our experience of the platform in any way. If we had wanted to borrow audience, we might have given Dare2compete more weightage. We did list the event there though, and got 6 registrations, none of which paid the registration fee. So the audience premium did not really translate for us.
- The UX - Contest Participant
Clearly, this was the clincher. The UX of Judgify.me for a contest participant is very easy, intuitive, and flexible. It allows the user to:
A. Partially enter their data.
B. Save entry as draft.
C. Make changes after submission.
We found that the screen flow was very intuitive, did not involve a lot of learning for the user, and was neither clunky nor field heavy. There weren't so many fields that a person gets intimidated, nor so few that we can't get the information we need.
When I tested the Jury interface, it was so perfect! When we register on Dare2Compete, we find that the jury member gets an email saying "password reset required." The jury member would and should not click on such an email. One does not password reset on a platform where they have never registered. We asked support if we could change the content of the email OR suppress it entirely. They said that both are not possible. That was a deal-breaker. That was not the experience that we wanted our jury members to have. In this day of security consciousness, password reset is absolutely the most unacceptable subject line to have.
The Admin UX is adequate in both. There is some learning curve and some manual work that needs to be done. In Judgify.me, some jury members did not receive the emails and asked us to change the email id. So, I had to create them as a new entry. But overall, the Admin UX is fairly intuitive and we found it to be better than in Dare2Compete.
Another super important area for any event organiser. On this front, Judgify.me wins hands down.
Disclaimer: In spite of being an Agile PM for over a decade, i am never in a hurry. When we raise a support ticket, we always have at least a 10 hour window for its solution. So, if responsiveness means 5 minutes or less, or if you are the kind of organiser for whom everything is L1, this rating may not be useful.
Dare2Compete was only available on email, with an average response time of 24 hours. Further, there was no continuity in the messages.
Judgify.me had a much shorter response time. But what was better was that even though it was only emails, one knew that one was talking to a real person (Joseph, in my case) and there was continuity.
Expect an average response time of 2-5 hours.
So, that is the story of how we chose our contest management platform.
