How Event Organizers Launched Online Awards for Community Members

Kamila Palka
Kamila Palka
Organizing an online voting contest is quite a challenging task, especially when there are different categories and candidates. Is it possible to manage such a contest and make sure the participants don’t follow bad practices to obtain more votes? Today we take a look at how OpenExpo Europe ran a very successful Open Awards online. Read on!

The client

OpenExpo Europe is the largest professional event in Technological Innovation, Digital Transformation, and Open Source in Spain, making it the reference point for open technologies in the country. The wide range of exhibitions and rich content of the seminars lead to OpenExpo Europe being an interesting destination for all types of companies, where the exhibiting companies present their innovations, technological solutions, and the latest trends. 

What are the Open Awards?

The second edition of the Open Awards was a great success, with more than 100 participants in eight different categories. The third edition took place on June 6th and 7th, 2018. There are two main objectives of the Open Awards: to recognize and reward innovative open source and free software projects that stood out over the past year. The awards also promote the notoriety of Open IT innovation companies, projects, and administrations behind the projects.

There were eight different categories in the 2018 edition of the Open Awards. The participants submitted their candidature through an online registration form. The organizers were looking for the best in the following categories::

Professional:

  • Service/solution provider
  • Success story company/public administration
  • Digital transformation: large company
  • Digital transformation:  SME

Social:

  • Medium or blog
  • Tech community
  • Project in transparency, citizen participation, and open government
  • Big data/open data project

Revelation:

  • Startup
  • Cloud solution
  • App
  • Most innovative platform/project

Objectives of the online Open Awards

Open Awards are yearly held by OpenExpo Europe and their principal objective is to grab the attention of Open IT companies. OpenExpo Europe also wants to better position the event and promote and recognize innovative and successful projects.

2016, 2017, and 2018 editions were launched and managed with Easypromos, and all three followed the same participation pattern. There were three stages: 

  1. Registration: companies submitted their entries through an online registration form. They submitted contact and company information and explained their Open Source/Free Software projects.

open awards

2) Public vote: once all the nominations were submitted the organizers invited the public to vote. OpenExpo Europe encouraged the participants to share their candidacy on social media channels in order to try and make it to the top 5 in their category.

3. Jury: a specialized jury reviewed the most voted nominations in each category. 

How the technology awards were managed

OpenExpo Awards looked for tools that would facilitate the participation and management of the awards, therefore they turned to the following Easypromos tools:

  • In order to display all the categories, the organizers went for the Easypromos Promotion Group. It allowed the participants and voters to easily locate different categories and navigate through them, as Promotion Groups allows you to show different promotions on the same page, with one direct link. 

open awards

  • Each category displayed in the Promotion Group was a different voting contest. That way the voters could only vote in the category that interested them, and the awards contest organizers could easily manage the final votes. The Easypromos voting apps come with an anti-fraud system that allows the organizers to verify all incoming votes and forbid malpractice. The Easypromos contest applications show organizers a fraud rate of each voter, and based on that they can decide whether to exclude participants.

open awards

The results

Thanks to the Promotion Group it was fairly easy to analyze the results of each category. Here are the final numbers from the 2018 edition:

  • Total number of candidates: 115
  • Total number of votes: 4.315
  • Page views: 32.335
  • Total number of visitors: 12.527

As the most popular was the Most innovative platform/project category, here are the category details:

  • Candidates: 23
  • Total number of votes in the category: 1.044
  • Page views: 7.979
  • Total number of visitors: 2.795

Testimonial

The best thing about using Easypromos is the ease of use, and also the cost savings. The ready-made templates facilitate the use of this self-service platform. It has been super easy to launch the campaign and finalize it once it was the time. The Easypromos app is also easy to customize so you can give it an interesting tool. In our case, it has definitely met our needs.

-Philippe Lardy-

CEO of OpenExpo Europe