Awards Management | Case study
CIPD Ireland
Background
The CIPD is the professional body for HR and people development, responsible for championing better work and working lives. They set the gold standard for people management and development and influence policy and practice in the world of work.
In Ireland, they are focussed on the CIPD’s strategic development, its growth, engagement with members, and the national policy agenda. They build strategic relationships with key government departments, other relevant bodies and HR leaders to enable this.
In addition to this work, CIPD Ireland run an annual awards program recognising excellence in people management.
When it came to their 2020 awards offering, they sought an online tool to help transition their workflow process from a traditional paper-based method to an automated system which would allow the awards program to run more efficiently.
The team knew the advantage that having an automated system would have both externally, building a better customer journey, and internally, removing the labour intensive manual process.
“The end-to-end experience of our experience was insightful in that we learned how to streamline our users’ journey through the knowledge the product team within Submit was able to offer.”
Before Submit.com
Prior to the introduction of Submit.com, the awards program operated using word documents to record the entrant’s submissions, which were then acknowledged using a ‘shared’ mailbox.
Judging was handled in a two-round approach, with round one leaning heavily on the use of Word, PDF files and specific judging inboxes for tracking and recording. And round two, a face to face for finalists to present their ‘submission stories’ to a panel of judges.
In mid-2019 an internal review was conducted on the lifecycle of a standard awards project from both an internal and external lens and it was then the decision to research an automated solution was kicked off.
After intensive research on various platforms available, the relationship between CIPD Ireland and Submit.com was formed.
“I reached out to Emmet from Sales, and that’s when it all kicked off”, Fiona Mc Dermott, Projects Executive, CIPD Ireland.
A seamless customer journey
‘The customer experience was the seller!’ Fiona stated when asked about why they chose to go with the Submit.com solution.
By working closely with the Submit team, CIPD Ireland could achieve the desired journey they wanted their entrants to experience, by going through their journey ‘step by step’ and adjusting as required.
Throughout her use of the platform and engagement with the support and development team, Fiona held nothing but high praise.
“I never doubted the team for one moment. I had 110% faith in Sarah and she never once let me down. That is highly uncommon today.”
Helpful Features
Submit.com have an array of useful features and CIPD Ireland implemented several throughout the awards cycle to ensure efficiency and enhancement of their entrants’ journey.
They utilised the tagging feature to keep track of the entrants’ status and categories entered. This was a time-saver in the round 1 judging phase.
‘Auto-tagging was brilliant because we tagged against the categories, so was great for the searching, filtering and reporting functions!’
Another feature, they found particularly useful was the File Upload question type.
“We asked our entrants to upload supporting materials to enhance their application and tell us their ‘story'”, Fiona stated.
Using this question type allowed them to ask their entrants to upload material such as PowerPoint presentations decks, videos and overview summaries.
Key Features Used
The real saver
A challenge the team at CIPD faced was breaking away from the ‘traditional’ way of doing things and of course in what the entrants expected the process to be! And there was the adage of ‘if it isn’t broken….’ However, after rigorous cost-benefit analysis in terms of both staff resources, financials and user experience the value add of moving to an automated process won out.
By freeing up resources that would normally be aligned to the manual application and judging rounds, it allowed more focus on the actual awards ceremony itself, a highlight in the CIPD events calendar, and which this year had its debut at the Round Room at the Mansion House.
There was a concern on trying to get the mindsets to change. Now I think we wouldn’t go back.”
Get started today
If you think it’s time to streamline your award submission process or you’re interested in more ways to modernise your current workflow and review process, talk to one of our senior solutions specialists today.
