Whether you’re working with an awards review committee or you have the solo responsibility of planning an upcoming competition or awards ceremony, you’ll be tasked with narrowing down the list of possible nominees.
The most successful award ceremonies prioritize strategic planning, building strong relationships with vendors and creating a nomination process that exudes fairness and integrity for both voters and nominees.
Our nomination solutions have been used by clients across many industries and with eBallot, event and award show planners have been able to streamline the judging process for their most highly viewed industry awards.
Thanks to our 16+ year history working on award ceremonies for clients like The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame, we have these helpful tips to share with those who are trying to create the perfect nomination process for their event.
Here's how to make your election run better with online voting
Finalizing your nominee list
One of the first steps to crafting your award ceremonies nomination strategy is to finalize the nominee list in order to ensure only the best entries are submitted for final nominations.
If you’re wondering how to whittle down the list of possible nominees without injecting your own bias, eBallot’s award show planning solutions allow you to run multiple ballots within the same voting event, meaning you hold as many nomination rounds as needed to finalize your award recipients.
Ideally, ceremony planners should consider at least running the nomination portion of the award votes online, as they are most likely to benefit from the simplicity of online voting, and the effectiveness of using eBallot’s online platform for voter outreach, reminder emails or fully anonymous voting capabilities.
Notifying your voters
Once your initial nomination strategy is in place, plan ways to notify your voters of upcoming ballot deadlines, instructions for casting their ballot, or keep them in the loop about which nominees are predicted favorites.
Whether you use our in-app web and mobile voter email solutions or choose to use your own email client for voter notifications, the ability to schedule notifications and send voters their ballots directly will help keep the logistics of your award show simple and stress-free.
Top Nomination Tactics for Award Show Voting
Since not every award show has the same nomination or award judgement process, here’s a helpful breakdown of the best nomination tactics for different types of award ceremonies.
Usually, a Hall of Fame review committee is the responsible party for determining the final ballot options for Hall of Fame voting in most industries, however there are cases where write-in candidates for Hall of Fame voting is deemed acceptable. Often times, Hall of Fame voting is open to public and hosted online via the governing body’s website.
Most Hall of Fame votes include multiple voting rounds, weighted choices (an option that gives some voters more sway than others, such as giving Hall of Fame members more influence through their votes than members of the general public), runoff elections and eBallot can even offer Hall of Fame nomination customers specialized reports to see the results broken down by location and key demographics.
Award show voting for televised events such as The Grammys or The Academy Awards can take several months of planning. While the Academy of Music chooses to release the selected list of Grammy nominees to the public several months in advance, the vote itself for each category is closed to members of the Academy only, ensuring that nominees are selected based on merit and not trending status.
Having worked with both institutions before, our Managed Nominations solutions can help large governing bodies like these pull off highly, complex nomination rounds with ease.
Being highlighted by your peers and colleagues for the amount of hard work you put into your industry is a glorious feeling, which is why eBallot works to reward that effort by tailoring our industry award show nomination ballots to feature nominee biographies, mission statements, resumes, work history or even write-in options so that your voters are presented with the right information to make the best choices.
- Online Awards and e-Voting
Your online awards ceremony wouldn’t be complete with an online nomination process, and that’s why our Self-Managed e-Voting solutions are the best option for eSports leagues and other digital organizations looking to increase online engagement and turnout for key voting events.
Our Self Managed voting solutions are all online, feature unlimited ballots for a low monthly subscriptions and come with all of the special features listed here that will allow your award show organizers to create a truly interactive nomination process.
Ready to create your award show ballot?
Head over to the eBallot tour or pricing page to get a better sense of our platform, or just sign up directly with this link.
Need some time to think it over? Feel free to request a demo from eBallot to receive a quick video of our software solutions and online ballots.
Alex Hay : Nov 9, 2020
Brian Carter : May 10, 2019
Katie McCaskey : Mar 25, 2019
Mia Logan