How Canadian Special Events saw a 40% rise in its awards program entries thanks to Evalato

With Stacy Wyatt, Founder & Publisher of Canadian Special Events 

Canadian Special Events is a brand primarily focused on the Canadian event and meeting industry, bringing together independent planners, in-house corporate planners, third-party planners, as well as “accidental” planners, such as HR professionals in charge of planning events for their organization. Canadian Special Events also runs the Canadian Event Awards, which have become the hallmark of success for Canadian open-meeting planners.

Major pain points 

Prior to using an awards management system, Canadian Special Events had applicants send their entries in binders, which was incredibly difficult to do and manage. In addition, the company also struggled with: 

• Organization of files 
• Sorting a large number of entries 

“I think that one of our greatest pain points prior to starting with Evalato was the organization of our files within the system,” Stacy Wyatt, Founder & Publisher

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How Evalato helped them out 

Implementing the Evalato awards management software enabled Canadian Special Events to collect and sort entries much more efficiently, handling the challenges of large entry volumes and looming deadlines with ease. They particularly enjoyed Evalato’s:

• Sorting capabilities — the team was able to sort all the columns easily, which proved particularly handy when something needed to be changed on short notice. 

Evalato keeps users in control at all times, thanks to an at-a-glance view of applications, while handy tags enable easy application management. 

“[What] I love about Evalato is that it stores the entries in a way that allows you to search for an entry with tags, keywords, the name of the company, the name of the person, the name of the event. That’s really powerful.” Stacy Wyatt, Founder & Publisher

• Export options — the company utilized Evalato’s export options, using the information for follow-up articles, PowerPoint presentation, as well as their Gala, enhancing the impact of their awards program. 

Evalato’s fantastic data portability supports various export options including PDF files, Excel spreadsheets, and different folder structure settings.

“I also love the fact that I can export the data sorted by category. That makes all the difference in the world. [...] Having all a lot down to be exportable as an Excel and as pre-sorted categorized with intelligent names that match what we're looking for is just a huge bonus.” Stacy Wyatt, Founder & Publisher

• Customer support — Canadian Special Events took advantage of Evalato’s 5-star customer service, which has been highly praised by users everywhere. 

“We always have questions, you know, every once in a while we get stuck and really appreciate the fact that there's somebody there. So that's really important, especially around the deadline time there's not a lot of window of opportunity for us to wait two days for an email.” Stacy Wyatt, Founder & Publisher   

Additionally, the awards program also benefited from: 

• Adapting categories — the company adapted 80 of the categories to reflect a shift to experiential marketing events. 

Evalato features an enhanced category structure capable of supporting a large volume of categories, complete with groups and subgroups. 

• Expanding the program’s jury — this lent extra credibility to the program, giving confidence to the applicants that their work will be evaluated by a diverse jury. 

Evalato caters to evaluators with a full-fledged judging portal, accessible from any device, which makes your jury happy, lifting the likelihood that they will return for the next edition of your program.  

“We expanded our jury to 35 people which I think brought a much stronger greater depth of experience voices to the table, which gave confidence to those that were entering to know that their work was going to be judged by a a wide branch of people coming from a wide and a diverse background,” Stacy Wyatt, Founder & Publisher

The results 

Using the Evalato awards management platform helped Canadian Special Events streamline 

and improve their awards program, achieving the following: 

• A 40% rise in entries per person/company — they attribute this rise to the platform, whose ease of use motivated applicants to submit multiple entries once they saw how simple it is; 

“That's a really strong number but I do directly attribute that to the platform.” Stacy Wyatt, Founder & Publisher

• Positive feedback from applicants — they received compliments on the ease of use from those entering the program, thanks to everything being laid out very clearly, with almost no way to get lost. 

“Evalato is simplified, strong, clear, easy to use, and very powerful. So, I think you’ve got a winning combination.” Stacy Wyatt, Founder & Publisher

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