By celebrating those leading the way, The Circle Awards aims to inspire and empower others to adopt circular practices, and in turn make the whole world as well-rounded as it can possibly be. In 2021, the inaugural year, The Circle Awards: Australia and New Zealand was set up as a pilot program to understand what works and what doesn’t, before scaling the Awards internationally.

In researching and selecting a provider of event management software to run the awards program, the key factors in making the selection were driven by the ability to apply the awards own brand styling across the end-to-end experience. The flexibility in setting up the award categories and the ease of entry management were also key factors alongside the ability to have a judging process that was both efficient and hassle free.

Initially, founder of The Circle Awards, Nick Hoskin at The World’s Most Rubbish (TWMR), had planned to build bespoke software to manage the Awards, but even with his own development team in-house the benefits of working with a software supplier far outweighed this investment. As a result of a successful inaugural year, Hoskin concluded that he “wouldn’t even consider running an Awards program without a software partner in place in the future.”

In fact, the success of the first year of the Awards far exceeded Hoskin’s expectations. The key areas that he focused on to validate success were the number of judges that met the selection criteria, the number of supporting brands and the number of valid entries. These considerations, alongside the number of votes in the Peoples’ Choice award – which far exceeded expectation at over eleven thousand – resulted in a hugely successful program that also generated more than thirty earned media articles from reputable titles.

The ease of the entry management process was declared the biggest element that contributed to being able to effectively manage a number of entries that was much higher than the team had expected. Hoskin commented;

“Evessio’s software enabled our team to focus on the many others areas of running the Awards without having to invest too much time or effort into ensuring we had the technical infrastructure in place to facilitate the operational side. With such a small team, anything that made our lives easier was crucial to our success.”

“We were so glad we made the decision to work with Evessio – the ongoing support we received from the team was brilliant and really gave us the confidence that anything was possible (even when some of our requests were super specific!). We found the platform super intuitive for managing entries and we also received very positive feedback from the judges about how easy the process was for them.”

The Circle Awards will be back in AUS & NZ in 2022, bigger, better & rounder than ever before also launching in the UK and beyond. Watch this space……