The Florida Public Transportation Association (FPTA) is one of my yearly contract clients. For their Marketing Awards, they wanted to convert their color pdf brochure and fillable submission form into a fully online process. Since I set up and manage all of their event registrations, they were confident I could also create a simple automation process for the Marketing Awards.
History & Discovery
I communicated with committee members that had several years of close knowledge of the original process. I was able to gather what was working and what was causing headaches. One of the biggest issues was keeping all of the entries organized. The submission form also needed to be paired up with the actual entry presentation that is mailed in to the committee chair.
Requirements
The Marketing Awards printed brochure contained everything from eligibility and entry requirements, to the award categories and the entry form itself. This all needed to be retained, presented clearly and succinctly, and displayed with a great viewing experience on mobile.
The new digital entry form needed to accommodate the varying entry requirements for each category. It also needed to adhere to a limit of (4) entries total per transit agency. Both the committee chair and the submitting agency needed a copy of their submission(s).
The last piece of the process was to allow easy access to all of the award entry forms. The information needed to be organized and understandable to both the committee members and the adjudicating agency.
Creation
We decided on a custom single page design, built into the existing FPTA website. I took all of the brochure information and laid it out in a branded Marketing Awards page. This included deadlines, submission categories, new guidelines, frequently asked questions, and more.
I next created a comprehensive online form that would show or hide additional questions based on answers to specific questions. This allowed the different entry categories to have customization where necessary.
Finally, I set up an automation that pushed all online form entries into an Airtable database.
End Result
FPTA now has an easy to update online marketing awards submission process. Since it is all web-based and the structure is there, they can make changes on the fly to any of the content when needed.
UPDATE: For the 2020 Marketing Awards, we added further functionality to allow judges to score entries electronically. This also allows for tabulation of scores to get the final winners. All done in Airtable.