Our optional Judging Module includes support for both audience choice (described elsewhere) and juried awards. For juried awards, you set up the different awards for your festival, define your voting rules, and invite in jury members to review the nominees and pick a winner.

Maximum Secrecy

Our entire jury process is designed so that only those who need to know what is going on can see what is going on. In fact, you can set up permissions so that even you, the festival director, has no idea how the voting is progressing and who the winner are.

The “Accountant” Role

It starts by setting up one or more people as accountants. A director can be an accountant, but does not have to be one. An accountant can be a director, but does not have to be one. The accountant is a special limited role that can do exactly one thing no one else in the system can do: see who is winning/has won each category and approve (or override) the winner.

• A festival director who is an accountant thus has access to everything in the system. 
• A festival director who is not an accountant has access to everything except the results of judging
• An accountant who is not a festival director can basically do nothing in the system except manage the results of judging

Keep the Jury Deliberations Secret

Jurors have the ability to keep notes about each selection. We store these jury notes in the database encrypted in a format readable only by the judge who created the note. The festival director, accountants, and even SparqFest staff have no ability to read these notes.

Control the Online Publication of Nominees/Winners

If you are using our judging module, then the site knows who the winners are and is capable of automatically showing the winners. However, this is one area in which we requires an affirmative act on a member of the festival staff before we push something to the site. Until you specifically turn on publicizing winners or nominees (separate settings for winners vs nominees), they remain hidden to everyone except the jurors and the accountants.

Once a director or accountant makes the nominees and/or winners public, however, the site takes care of rebuilding the relevant pages and publicizing who has won/been nominated. 

Robust Voting Rules

When you create an award in SparqFest, you can select from and customize a number of different voting rules:

• Vote based (each judge picks a winner)
• Scoring (each judge rates each selection)
• (Coming soon) Rubric (define a Rubric and judges rate on the rubric)

Nominations

You can nominate selections to each category as either a finalist or runner-up. This distinction of finalist vs. runner-up is hidden from everyone but the judges. The judges are required to watch only the finalists, but both finalists and runners-up are promoted on the web site (if nominees are public) as nominees.

To make nominations, you can leverage our automated nomination rules that place all selections that match certain criteria as nominees to the award. On the other hand, you also have the option of manually nominating each selection.

Voting

Judges then watch each selection and vote in accordance with the rules. They have the option of collaborating with the other judges online and they can change their votes any number of times before the deadline until they “finalize” their vote. Once all judges have finalized their votes or the deadline is past, SparqFest will calculate the winner.

Breaking Ties

From time to time, juries just cannot agree on a winner. You can assign a separate judge to break any deadlocks that arise in a given category.

No matter what, all winners must be approved by the festival accountant before being considered final. The accountant can even overrule the decision of the jury.

The “Winner” Report

Once all the votes are approved, the accountant can export all the winners as an Excel spreadsheet that you can use both in planning the awards ceremony and the creation of your trophies and certificates.

One Source for Laurels

FilmFreeway provides an OK solution for Official Selection laurels, but does a terrible job for award nominees and winners. SparqFest enables you to upload general Official Selection laurels as well as nominee and winner laurels for each category. When a creator visits the SparqFest Creator Portal, they see all of the laurels relevant to their specific selection and none of the irrelevant laurels. Your laurels also show up on the web site with the nominees and winners once you have made the nominees and winners public.