How Evalato helped Memcom grow its awards and impact

With Julian Smith, Executive Director, Commercial & Partnerships, Memcom

Memcom is the leading network for decision-makers from the membership sector, be it professional bodies, trade associations, learning societies, membership charities, trade unions, regulators, etc. It connects senior leaders together to collaborate, innovate, and impact change in society. The hub for leaders, Memcom helps organizations achieve their goals and celebrates their work through a year-round calendar of events and support networks. 

Memcom runs four key events a year, including a summer party, a winter party, a spring conference, and an awards program that celebrates everything that's brilliant about the membership sector.

Major pain points 

Before coming across Evalato, Memcom was using different pieces of awards management software, while remaining on the hunt for the perfect solution to take care of the following challenges: 

• A complicated process overall 
• A long time setting up an awards program 
• A lot of components to running an awards program

“As soon as we discovered Evalato it made all of the pain disappear genuinely. It simplified everything for us. [...] Initially, we did a sort of a whole beauty parade of other awards software. They were good but when we discovered Evalato we thought it was great from the first day.” Julian Smith, Executive Director, Commercial & Partnerships, Memcom

How Evalato helped Memcom with association awards management 

Memcom came across Evalato five years ago and the rest, as they say, is history. 

“It's easy to use, it looks good, it's easy to enter an award, it's easy to judge an award, it's easy for those of us who organize the awards to go in and change things, to tweak things, to set up the awards in the first place. It's absolutely a fantastic piece of software.” Julian Smith, Executive Director, Commercial & Partnerships, Memcom

Here’s what the organization appreciated the most after implementing Evalato: 

• User interface — Memcom particularly enjoyed how easy and intuitive Evalato was to use for everyone working with it, regardless of their technical and software expertise;

“It simplified everything for us. [...]  it's easy to use, it's it's intuitive. It was one of those pieces of software that just felt that I could tinker behind the scenes. I could pick things up as I went along, I didn't even need to look at the guides to understand it.” Julian Smith, Executive Director, Commercial & Partnerships, Memcom

Evalato’s ease of use is one of the awards management solution’s biggest strengths, making setting up a program a breeze, a process that has been simplified even further with the platform’s game-changing customizable templates. 

• Category structure — Evalato was able to easily accommodate a rise in Memcom’s awards program categories.

Evalato’s enhanced category structure with groups and subgroups caters excellently to any number of categories, giving awards organizers the ability to scale up their awards as they grow.  

• Analytics — Memcom had a snapshot of how the awards were performing weekly, monthly, and year-on-year, along with how customers respond to pricing campaigns, early-bird offers, etc., which they see as ‘invaluable’ from a marketing point of view.  

Evalato’s analytics options allow users to always have the full picture and improve all the time.   

Additionally, Memcom benefited from Evalato’s judging options which allowed the organization to accommodate a growing number of evaluators. 

“That means we had so many more end users using the same platform for judging. The whole thing became more complex but at the same time Evalato software really solved it for us.” Julian Smith, Executive Director, Commercial & Partnerships, Memcom

The results 

The Evalato association awards management software enabled Memcom to grow every aspect of their awards:

• 20%-25% year-on-year overall growth; 
• Growth in categories from 13 to 30+ categories celebrating everything from CEO Leadership of the year, all the way down to things like the best use of social media or best use of data artificial intelligence;
• A rise in judges — from 35 up to 75.

“It's not just about growth — it's about growth and engagement as well because obviously, growth in the awards implies more engagement. It means more people discover who Memcom is, what we're trying to do. They fall in love with what Memcom stands for and I think, without a shadow of a doubt, a lot of that is due to the success of the awards and a lot of the success of the awards is due to the Evalato platform.” Julian Smith, Executive Director, Commercial & Partnerships, Memcom