Going round the world. Then the world.
▶ Watch · The Circle Awards
In short —
When founder Nick Hoskin launched The Circle Awards in Australia and New Zealand, he had his own dev team in-house and could have built anything. He chose Evessio — and won't run an awards programme without a software partner again.
The programme
The Circle Awards is an annual programme that celebrates and unites the diverse businesses, organisations, projects, and people adopting circular practices to create a world where nothing goes to waste. By celebrating those leading the way, the programme 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 programme to understand what works and what doesn't, before scaling internationally.
Brand-first
Apply the awards' own styling across the end-to-end experience.
Flexible categories
Setup that grows with the programme.
Easy entries
Submission management without friction.
Efficient judging
Process designed for hassle-free decisions.
The build vs. buy decision
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. Even with his own development team in-house, the benefits of working with a software supplier far outweighed that investment.
After a successful inaugural year, Hoskin concluded that he wouldn't even consider running an Awards programme without a software partner in place in the future
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11,000+ public votes in year one.
The team focused on validating success through several measures — judges, supporting brands, valid entries, and the People's Choice vote, which far exceeded expectation at over eleven thousand. The result: more than thirty earned media articles from reputable titles.
Year one exceeded expectations
The success of the first year far exceeded Hoskin's expectations. The ease of the entry management process was declared the biggest factor that contributed to managing a number of entries that was much higher than the team had expected.
"Evessio's software enabled our team to focus on the many other areas of running the Awards without having to invest too much time or effort into ensuring we had the technical infrastructure in place. With such a small team, anything that made our lives easier was crucial to our success."
Nick Hoskin · Founder, The Circle AwardsStraight from the room
Words from the Circle Awards team.
The ongoing support we received from the team was brilliant.
It really gave us the confidence that anything was possible.
Even when some of our requests were super specific!
Very positive feedback from the judges about how easy the process was for them.
What's next
The Circle Awards will be back in Australia and New Zealand in 2022 — bigger, better, and rounder than ever — and is also launching in the UK and beyond.
Launching an awards programme that needs to scale?
See how Evessio supports inaugural events ambitious enough to go global.