How The American Institute of Building Design saved 70% of staff time and doubled its programs with Evalato

The American Institute of Building Design (AIBD), a nonprofit professional organization established in 1950, strives to protect and enhance its member’s ability to practice their profession. AIBD is committed to providing quality continuing education to ensure that its members remain current with technology, materials, and building codes. AIBD is also committed to establishing and maintaining professional relationships with other trade, business, and professional organizations within the design and construction industry.

They have been running our yearly American Residential Design Awards (ARDA) program for over a decade, and in 2020 will be adding a second yearly awards program focused on commercial building design.
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Major pain points

Evalato wasn’t the first solution AIBD used to ease their work – they actually tried various technologies before switching to Evalato. However, not using a unified platform made their processes more complicated, costly and time-consuming.

“We’ve used various technology over the last decade for our American Residential Design Awards (ARDA), but Evalato has been the best by far.”

Garrett Mickley, AIBD Communications Director

Before Evalato, AIBD team struggled to find an easy way:

• For entrants to upload pictures and files
• For the judges to view uploaded pictures and files
• To showcase the winners

“Before Evalato, we had to pay a lot more for a large file upload server, then spend large amounts of time downloading and reorganizing the files for the judges, and then again for showcasing the winners. The winners had to then be uploaded again to another file sharing service.”

What they did

AIBD streamlined their work into one platform and made their customer and judge experiences a joy. Here’s how they solved their main pain points:

• Easy to build and use entry forms
  Evalato’s super intuitive drag-and-drop form builder allowed AIBD team to create their form in no time. ARDA’s entrants then got their own workspace to fill out the form and upload any required files and images with a few clicks.
• Convenient and intuitive judging portals
  ARDA’s judges also got a personal online portal to view and assess all applications with ease.
• Ready-to-use customizable applications webpage
  AIBD took advantage of a great Evalato feature – a customizable web page to publicly show the results of their awards where they select the information they want to be disclosed, such as a list of applications, individual submission details, average rating, individual judge votes, etc. What’s best is that this needed zero coding or design skills since the page is ready-to-use and go live whenever the organizers decide. AIBD team also loved the option that allowed their audience to access each individual application for more details.

Thus, for the first time in their history, ARDA achieved the maximum transparency they always strived for with no effort and no additional costs.

“Evalato has solved all three of those problems for us by providing easy to use forms, judging accounts, and individual URLs to each of the winners.”

Garrett Mickley, AIBD Communications Director

Building Design Awards

The results

AIBD is an innovative organization always on the lookout for ways to work smarter. So it’s not a coincidence they chose Evalato for their solution.

Evalato helped them streamline their processes and make their applicants and judges happy.

They also achieved 100% transparency of their awards with zero effort. Using one software instead of multiple solutions for their awards also resulted in both time and money saved. What’s more, they managed to increase the frequency of their award programs thanks to this higher efficiency.

“Using Evalato has saved a considerable amount of staff time which has greatly increased our ability to provide better quality and more frequent awards programs.’’

Garrett Mickley, AIBD Communications Director

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Want your awards to run smoother like AIBD?

Check out the features of Evalato awards management software to save time and deliver a seamless experience for applicants and judges.

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