Tag Archives: BetterBNC

Happy Thanksgiving!

We want to thank you, our valued customers, for choosing BetterBNC and we also appreciate you sharing your contest experiences and referring colleagues to BetterBNC. As a result, we’re excited to have welcomed numerous contests in the past couple of months including a growing number of student media competitions, as well as the California News Publishers Association and the Pacific Northwest News Association. We hope you’ll all keep your feedback coming in as it helps us continually explore ways to further improve the BetterBNC contest platform. We wish you a wonderful holiday season and look forward to working with you in 2018.

Not using BetterBNC yet? Learn more about us today. BetterBNC exclusively serves journalistic sanctioning organizations in print and broadcast news, advertising, book publishing and creative trades. All of us at BetterBNC are dedicated to providing organizations with a better way to produce their peer-reviewed contests and give contestants and judges the best features and benefits. We’re available to provide organizations with an in-depth demonstration of BetterBNC’s features so they see how the platform can transform their contest this season. To schedule a demo at your convenience, simply contact us by emailing karen@smalltownpapers.com.

What’s new in BetterBNC’s fall release?

NEW Administrator Tools Streamline Processes

Creating your competitions just got a lot easier! When creating competitions, you can now choose whether to combine circ groups or keep them separate for each category — all with a single click! And, managing competitions has been streamlined with new features designed to improve workflow.

New at-a-glance tickers help you track your contest progress! The admin dashboard and competitions page now provide quick views of your numbers — a real time saver and a great way to monitor the activity of your contestants and judges.

If you accept Open Call® entries you will appreciate the new way entries can now be automatically assigned to a circulation group, and Open Call entries are now included in a new at-a-glance ticker. Contact us if you have any questions about using the new administrator tools.

What is Entry Asset Manager?

Of the five BetterBNC modules available, Entry Asset Manager is one of the most increasingly requested by contest admins. It allows you to download all attachments, website URLs, and judges’ comments from all contest winning entries at one time. All winning entry content items are organized into folders and uploaded to a secure FTP website for contest admins to download all at once, saving you valuable time and effort. Contact us if you’d like to learn more about Entry Asset Manager, any of the modules available or other customization.

If you have a contest and are interested in BetterBNC’s platform, contact us to schedule a demo. Simply email karen@smalltownpapers.com.

New BetterBNC features coming soon!

Thank you to our BetterBNC customers who offer great feedback and suggestions. Those are instrumental in helping us design new features to add to BetterBNC each year. We’re pleased to announce a new round of updates coming this fall including:

  • Customized homepage featuring new templates and an improved web editor interface to allow more freedom in design and ease of use of the homepage editor
  • Open Call® will see upgraded tools and features and a simplified administrator process
  • New reporting options with many reports having the option to display as tables (and/or download as xls); more reporting choices will also be available
  • Judges can print out a receipt of all their winner selections, public comments, and their private notes and scoring
  • Contest admins receive expansive new audit tools
  • Look for numerous changes to buttons, messaging, graphical design and intuitive features

if you are ready to renew your contest, please contact the office at 360.427.6300. If you are interested in BetterBNC for your contest, you can email Karen@smalltownpapers.com to schedule a complimentary demo.

Trust-but-verify: Receipts for Judges and Tools for Audit

Your good name gives value to the awards you present, so trust, integrity and ethical behavior cannot be taken for granted. BetterBNC for years has incorporated robust security capabilities and is now adding key new “trust-but-verify” features.
In our upcoming release, contest admins can allow judges to print out their own receipt of their winner selections along with public comments, and private notes and scoring data. The receipt will show the date the receipt was run.
New audit tools will give contest admins a way to quickly and definitively view not only the progress of judging, but also details including when and if any judgments have been changed.
These important contest management tools help assure all participants — your organizational leadership, judges and contestants — that your contest results are accurate and fair.
BetterBNC is the online contest platform leader across north America for a reason. We have earned the trust of publishing association executives along with publisher board members by valuing our customer relationships, respecting sanctioning authority, and protecting contestant entries and judges’ decisions.

An easier way to run your media contest.

Your journalism and media awards have a significant impact in your industry, so it’s critical to select the right company to ensure your success. Only trust the process to an organization with a proven method to accomplish your goals with the security, ethics and efficacy required in today’s best juried competitions.

BetterBNC innovates with exclusive features not available anywhere else. Contestant Manager® gives individual media organizations control to manage their entries from multiple departments and employees, and Open Call® allows you to open your contest to freelance journalists around the world.

BetterBNC exclusively serves journalistic sanctioning organizations in print and broadcast news, advertising, book publishing and creative trades. If you would like to experience a better way of producing your peer-reviewed contest process and give your contestants and judges the best features and benefits, please contact us for an in-depth demonstration of how BetterBNC can transform your contest this season. Simply call (360) 427-6300 or email karen@smalltownpapers.com.

BetterBNC Spring Platform Updates

We work hard to continuously improve the BetterBNC contest platform now being used by hundreds of organizations across North America. Now, we’re pleased to share details on two important updates.

Captcha: Thanks to user feedback, we’ve made two significant changes to the contestant entry form.

  1. The entry form has been redesigned and simplified.
  2. We have replaced the “Google Captcha” with a more widely known system which saves time by asking fewer and easier questions.

Why do we need Captcha? The “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” program helps ensure your contestant entries are legitimately made by a real person — computers cannot successfully read the distorted text, which greatly reduces the chances of a “hacker bot” gaining access to your contest.

PayPal Integration: For users of the Revenue Manager module — a software update from PayPal we deployed closes a rare occurrence related to timely reporting of payments to your PayPal Advanced account from certain bank cards. Note that some cards, such as American Express, may require additional setup within your PayPal Advanced account (contact PayPal for information).

Have a question? Just complete a trouble ticket and we’ll get back to you.

BetterBNC Provides Top-Tier Admin Training

BetterBNC leads the way in comprehensive and unlimited training and support for all client contest administrators. Running an awards competition can be challenging but you can count on us to provide guidance every step of the way. If you need help, let us know.

Please remember that BetterBNC requires that all contest administrators receive training from us directly. That includes any helper admins you may have working on your contest within our platform. Each admin must also have their own login credentials — do not share your credentials with anyone. Please contact us to establish additional admin accounts. These accounts will remain active until you tell us to cancel, so it’s important to manage these carefully.

As a contest admin, you can always complete a trouble ticket if you have questions and a member of our tech team will get right back to you.

Why choose BetterBNC for your contest?

Why BetterBNC — an easy, intuitive online platform designed specifically for the print and broadcast media, creative and PR industries?

  • Operates on powerful cloud servers to ensure smooth operation even during the busiest of contest seasons.
  • Includes robust standard features and can be customized to your unique contest requirements.
  • Encourages industry best-practices for fairness, transparency and ethical behavior.
  • Features designed to help your contestants and judges manage their work efficiently.
  • Accommodates contests of all sizes and complexities.
  • Is an affordable and efficient contest solution for all types of media organizations.
  • BetterBNC is repeatedly recognized for its outstanding user support and administrator training.
  • BetterBNC’s Advisor Group, made up of contest executives and senior admins, provides valuable oversight and gives you a voice in new features and benefits.

BetterBNC is being used by hundreds of organizations across North America and thousands of contestants.  Schedule a complimentary demo today and see how BetterBNC can improve your organization’s contest experience for your contest admin, judges and contestants.  Email karen@smalltownpapers.com for details.

A Better Way to Judge Your Media Contest

It’s one of the most important facets of the contest experience – the judging structure.  For a smaller contest, it may be fairly simple and straightforward.  But, particularly for larger media contests, reviewing and rating entries can involve a number of judges, more than one judge evaluating each entry, multiple rounds of judging, a wide range of criteria being evaluated and feedback being provided to contestants. It can be quite complex.

BetterBNC can accomodate all of the above.  The base platform is perfect for a straightforward judging process and the platform has modules available for more sophisticated judging structures including:

Entry Asset Manager – Download all attachments, website URLs, and judges’ comments from all contest winning entries at one time. All winning entry content items are organized into folders and uploaded to a secure FTP website for admins to download all at once, saving time and effort.

Detailed Scoring Module – Add multiple criteria to each category’s judging form, each with its own scoring slider and comments field. Reports allow you to retrieve all scores/comments for every entry (winners and non-winners), including up to 5 places for winners. Allows for an enhanced judging feedback approach, allowing admins to retrieve all judge feedback for all entries (winners and non-winners).

Advanced Judging Module – Multiple judges may be assigned per category (automated/manual options), with multiple rounds of judging, and admin reports help you retrieve all winners’ information.Allows for multiple rounds of judging and multiple judges per entry, with all admin reports to help track results at each state.

Multi-round Judging Module – Two or more rounds of judging can be applied to your contest. Once your first round judging is complete, we create a duplicate contest database, allowing each finalist entry to be moved to any new categories/judging set by admin.

BetterBNC can also provide customization for contests with unique judging processes that modules do not address.  Contact us to schedule a complimentary demo at your convenience or to get started with BetterBNC.  Email karen@smalltownpapers.com for details.