Tag Archives: contest platform

Input sought for online scholastic contests

As scholastic contests begin the move to the online environment, important considerations emerge such as adopting best practices to standardize rules, processes, and judging, while ensuring flexibility for contest administrators and wide acceptance by contestants and judges.

As the maker of an online platform for journalism and media competitions, BetterBNC has successfully brought industry standardization to professional state associations, the Associated Press, many SPJ chapters, and a host of specialty print and broadcast trade associations. BetterBNC is the preferred platform for a growing number of scholastic contests as well (among them the Kansas Scholastic Press Association, Colorado High School Press Association and the Florida Scholastic Press Association) and has now committed to building a contest platform specifically for scholastic awards programs. The main benefits of the new platform are: produced for the specific needs of scholastic contests, sliding-scale pricing, and industry uniformity for contestants and judges.

If you would like to share the features that are important to your contest, you can participate in an online survey (available here). You can also contact BetterBNC to schedule a demo allowing you to see how the platform works.  

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.

A look at what’s new at BetterBNC.

BetterBNC works to continuously improve the user experience for everyone involved in your contest, including:

  • A redesigned entry form which is even more user friendly
  • PayPal Advanced major software update with the latest version integrated into BetterBNC
  • Backend upgrades including the migration to the latest generation cloud servers to ensure stability, reliability and speed.

We’re not stopping there. We’re already hard at work on platform enhancements that will be in place for the upcoming contest season beginning in September.

  • 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.
  • Look for numerous changes to buttons, messaging, graphical design and intuitive features.

To learn more about BetterBNC, schedule a complimentary platform demo or for other information, please contact karen@smalltownpapers.com.

Get the contest functionality you want.

Working with an online contest platform, you will inevitably discover different things you want and need as contest seasons go by. Perhaps after a year or two, you realize that having integration with PayPal would be great or your organization may change the contest’s judging structure. With BetterBNC, you’re able to make changes – just let us know what new functionality you need and we’ll work with you to make it happen.

If you have questions about what is involved in implementing changes, simply call us or complete a trouble ticket and we’ll follow up with you. Remember, there is no additional charge for your support or training. We want to ensure your contest experience is the best it can be.

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.