How to host a successful poster competition?

Poster competitions are great visual platforms to share information, inspire creativity, innovation and network with experts and non-experts. They are, like the amazing desserts, that you see in shows like the Great British Baking Show. To whip up delectable desserts or in your case a successful poster competition, you need to get the ingredients and recipe right. Look around no more and you have landed at the right kitchen, ahem, I mean, the article.

The ingredients for the competition would be you and your organizing team, participants, judges, platform for scoring (paper, software applications), platform for communication and place (physical or virtual) to host the competition. Let’s dig deeper into the recipe now.

Ingredients of hosting a successful poster competition.

1. Collect information: First things first, you start with collecting information about your participants. Start out with a template of the information that are essential.
2. Organize information: The job does not end with just collecting the information but synthesizing it into a structured and presentable format. Setting up a template greatly helps in the organization of your information. Having a sort feature for the various fields in the participants’ information is greatly recommended for saving both your time and efforts throughout the entire process.
3. Build rubric:The next key aspect is to build a rubric with the scoring criteria and scale/format. Tailoring your rubric to suit the theme and requirements of your competition is critical. Sharing the rubric with your participants and judges proves useful and elevates the standard of the competitions as the two critical stakeholders are well informed of their responsibilities.
4. Assembling the judges: You have the participants, the rubric and guess what else are we missing? Of course, the judges, without whom the process is incomplete. Starting early to confirm your individual judges or a judging committee.Like the case with the participants, collect the information of your judges and organize it into a custom-built template. Send the details of the format of the judging (paper, google docs, application etc.), the theme of your competition and rubric to your judges well in advance of the competition.
5. Pairing judges with participants: This is a critical step in piecing the competition together. Once you have an approximate count of the participants and judges, start by choosing the number of judges that would be evaluating a participant/group of participants. Then, you can choose to do one or more of the following options on the palette: random assignment, assignment by specific field, scoring criteria, categories of participants and the options are endless. Just decide the option most suitable for your competition needs.
6. Logistics: You need to plan the space for hosting the competition. Logistics is the prime factor that distinguishes a virtual competition from an in-person. Virtual competitions have become popular since the start of the pandemic and some folks want to continue down that pathway. So, make a choice as this decides the logistics surrounding it. You may also plan to go hybrid. If you are hosting the competition, nail down an appropriate location, contact vendors for renting or buying poster boards, let your participants know if they would have to print their posters or if you would take up that task, make a map of how the posters would be displayed and share the map with both the participants and judges.In case your decision is to go virtual, choose whether you want to go synchronous (participants present it live) or asynchronous (recorded presentation), and then accordingly select an appropriate digital platform to host the presentations. Test out the platform you want to use and make tutorials for your participants.
7. Judging: As reiterated earlier, you will need a format for the judges to score the participants. You could use paper, google docs, sheets, or an all encompassing judging and scoring platform like Scoretron. Ensure that your judges familiarize themselves with the scoring platform well in advance of the start of the competition. Sending them the rubric, instructions for the judging format and a tutorial video would be appreciated by them and ease last minute hassles on your end.
8. Score and analyze: At this juncture, all the groundwork has been done, the participants have been evaluated. It is time to calculate the scores and choose the statistic (average, total top score, median score) that will decide the winner. It is imperative to organize the scores and again, use a template for this purpose as well. Using analytical tools like bar-graphs, pie-charts for the scores helps in the decision making process to choose winners, tune your competition better for the next iteration and adds accountability on your end.
9. Constant communication: As the sun sustains the entire solar system, you as the organizer, are at the center of the whole process. You will have to communicate with your team, the participants and judges, constantly and pass on critical information at different stages of the competitions. A quick tip would be to have email templates setup for the various stakeholders at multiple stages of the competitions.

As you scan through the recipe to successfully host the best competition, you realize that there are a lot of components, decisions to make and platforms to use. Scoretron , a seamless evaluation, judging and scoring platform, is definitely the easy-bake solution for you. It lets one collect the information of participants and judges using a predefined template which automatically organizes it into a visually appealing database, assign and reason judges at the click of a button, calculate scores and provide analytical reports. To add on, Scoretron provides your judges with a user-friendly judging platform that can be used on any device and suited for both in-person and virtual competitions. You do not have to resort to a separate mailing application to get the communication intact as Scoretron has that feature built in to close the loop for your competition evaluation needs.

Ingredients- check, recipe-check, and more importantly an easy-bake competition evaluation solution (Scoretron)- check. Hope that now you are set to host your successful Poster competition and give a run for the Great British Baking Show!!!