No matter what your process for accepting submissions, SparqFest can bring in all the data you have for your submissions and turn them into Official Selections. There are specifically two ways to get a submission into SparqFest:
- Import from a CSV file (like what FilmFreeway provides you)
- Direct creation
If you are impatient and simply want to import your submissions, we have a shorter article. "Submissions" in our “Getting Started” section.
The Submissions Platform
When we use the term “submissions platform”, we are referring to whatever process you use to accept submissions to your festival. For the majority of our customers, the submissions platform is FilmFreeway. Other festivals use a direct invitation process, while others accept submissions on their own web site.
Whatever your submissions platform, you should be able to get a spreadsheet or CSV export from that platform that you can use to pull in all the data you collected during the submissions process into SparqFest.
What SparqFest Expects
When we pull in submissions data, we expect some basic fields to help us identify the submission. This information helps us avoid creating duplicates of the same submission if you import the same data multiple times.
- Tracking number - a unique code you use to track the submission
- Submission ID - a unique ID that the submissions platform uses to identify the submission
- Submitter Email - an email address to identify the submitter of the project
- Title - a title for the project
That's really it. If you are using FilmFreeway, your data will include all of this required information and a lot more.
How to Find the Tracking Number and Submission ID
If you are not using FilmFreeway, then your system may not account for a tracking number and submission ID. From our perspective, those values can be the same thing. The main requirement is that those values need to uniquely identify a submission across all editions of your festival. If you are using any kind of platform like FilmFreeway, they almost certainly have some kind of equivalent to one or both of those identifiers. If your process is based solely on your own spreadsheet, however, you may need to generate your own ID fields.
Generating Your Own IDs
As mentioned above, if you have one identifying field, you can use that field for both the tracking number and submission ID. Festivals who run their submissions process from a spreadsheet, however, may not have identifying fields in their spreadsheet. We recommend you do the following:
- Add two fields to your spreadsheet (what you call them does not matter)
- Column A - a sequence number that starts at one and increments for each row
- Column B - a calculated ID field
- Define column A so that row 1 has a “1” , define row 2 as being A1 + 1, then copy row 2 for the rest of the column
- Define column be as being a calculated string that is the year + the value in row 1
- Make the ID the year + the row number (e.g. CONCAT("2022-", $A1)).
When you do your import, your “Column B” will serve both as the tracking number and submission ID.
A Note on ID Generation
This above process works only if you have one edition per year. If you run multiple editions of your festival during the year, you will need a more complex ID so that there are no ID clashes between editions. Thus, add the edition number as well. For example: CONCAT("2022-2-", $A1) for the second edition of 2022.
You do not have to use this process. You can use any approach you like that will ultimately result in a unique ID for every project across all editions of your festival.
Accepting Submissions
We don't place any restrictions how you actually accept submissions. You can use the same processes you have always used to accept submissions and determine who gets into the festival. SparqFest gets involved only when you have made your decisions.
Categories and Entry Fees
While we don't place any restrictions on your processes, how your organize your categories and entry fees impacts how you get data into SparqFest.
When SparqFest pulls data in from a submissions platform, it looks for an associated submissions category under which the submitter submitted their work. In our experience, there are few commonalities in how people define their submission categories. Consequently, SparqFest uses categories only as a rough guide instead of establishing any hard rules around those categories. Nevertheless, some preparation can help make life easier in the process.
In short, SparqFest maps the categories from your submissions platform to categories in SparqFest. It's not a one-to-one mapping as the SparqFest categories serve a different function from your submissions platform categories.
Your submissions platform categories exist to help determine what fees a submitter should pay for a submission. In some cases, a single submission can pay to be considered under multiple categories. In addition, festivals often use the submissions process for projects to “self-nominate” to specific awards categories.
None of that is relevant to SparqFest. SparqFest needs to know two things about a submission:
- What kind of media do we need to request for exhibiting the work?
- What questions does the festival want to ask creators of this kind of work?
Before you do your import, you will therefore need to setup submission categories in SparqFest that will map to different categories in your submissions platform. We discuss this process in the article on Submission Categories.
Custom Questions
FilmFreeway and other platforms enable you to ask questions as part of the submissions process. We recommend you don't use this functionality unless you use the questions in support of your actual decision process in making selections. Otherwise, we provide a better system for pulling in custom questions and you won't make people who don't get accepted enter unused information.
We will import all of the information from your custom questions, but we recommend pre-defining the custom questions in our system before you do any imports. We cover custom questions in the article on Submission Categories.
Import Mappings
If you use FilmFreeway, you can simply export all your submissions from FilmFreeway and import them into SparqFest without any intermediate mapping step. For festivals that run their submissions from their own spreadsheets or use a platform other than FilmFreeway, we have the ability to define custom import mappings.
Do you use a commercial tool other than FilmFreeway?
We can add a supported import for you. Just create a support ticket requesting a mapping. Attach a sample export file from that tool and we will consider adding support for it.
To learn how to build your own import mappings, see the article Custom Import Mappings.
SparqFest Submission Categories
As noted earlier, before you can perform an import from your submissions platform, you must define submission categories that will categorize your submissions minimally by media type for the exhibition copy. In short, for every project, we need to know if we are asking for a video file, audio file, or PDF document.