The UK Digital Experience Awards
Celebrating Amazing Digital Achievements
The UK Digital Experience Awards (DXA) recognise the finest accomplishments from the UK’s digital organisations. Now in an ‘online format ‘from start to finish’ The UK DXA’s are back with 11 categories, in which businesses of every size and sector have the chance to do well.
These Awards recognise the organisations, teams and individuals who are achieving great digital results. You’ll be able to learn from the wide range of best practice on display throughout the day in open finalists’ presentations. Along with the chance to network, and win, the Awards are an inspirational experience that enables personal and professional growth.
The following is an overview of the awards.
For more information have a look around the site or email kristina@awrdsinternational.com.
Recruitment of Entries
The first part of the Awards is recruitment of entries. Our Awards Consultants are here to help potential entrants understand more about the event and the many benefits they can obtain from participation.
Judging
At the same time, we build a team of upwards of 50 judges. To make the judging thorough, we aim to allocate 5 judges to each panel. This ensures the judges have the time to scrutinise every entry in detail. You may have noticed a tendency among awards to increase the numbers of judges. That’s because of us. Slowly but surely the awards sector is realising that, to do your entry justice, it takes time and effort. A panel of 5 judges with 100 entries can’t spend enough time on the entries, it’s as simple as that.
On average our entries are assessed for at least 7.5 hours and scored 10 times.
The judges score the written submissions following the announcement of the finalists and before the event date of July 16th, using our online scoring app.
The Awards Finals
The 16th of July is the big day. The day all our judges and finalists and their guests and supporters have been waiting for. This is the day we hold the Awards Finals and ceremony. It’s an exhilarating experience. It’s a challenge, it’s fun, it’s active and it’s exciting and its all online, from start to finish.
The effort which the finalists and judges make in the morning is rewarded by hearing the results during a fun and engaging awards ceremony - online on our video conferencing technology and live on social media and YouTube.
During the morning 10 to 15 panels of judges assess the entries in live presentations. Categories of 5 finalists make presentations of 30 minutes to the judges. Back to back presentations are scored by the judges and the scores are entered into the online application, along with feedback and comments.
Awards Manager
The scores and comments are entered into our application, Awards Manager. We developed this software over the last ten years. It’s a bespoke application developed to ensure a smooth and enjoyable experience for our customers. Awards Manager also provides us with complete transparency at every stage of the entry and judging process. Awards Manager ensures we never lose an entry, never announce the wrong winners and we can always investigate any queries from our customers, with complete confidence. (Did someone say never say never?). It also enables us to send out judges’ feedback and category and individual scores to all our entrants following the awards.
The Awards Ceremony
The awards ceremony takes an hour or so in the afternoon and its online from start to finish. It will begin about an hour after judging finishes. This is the first time we will know who the winners are and we need to prepare the AV for the ceremony with the details of the Gold Silver and Bronze winners.
During the awards ceremony we hear from keynote speakers. We also have a raffle for our charity Barnardo’s, where we raise money for the Tiger Project.
The Tiger Project helps young adults who have had difficult lives to get back on the straight and narrow and make something of themselves. Since we started working with Barnardo’s our customers have raised £200,000 for this important cause.
A special host who runs the awards ceremony announces the awards presenters. The presenters announce the winners in each category, with the whole ceremony taking about an hour. It’s extremely fun - you’ll be glued to your seat and screen!
This will be streaming live on the internet so you can invite all your colleagues from work and even your friends to watch.
The finalists need to prepare a short acceptance speech and description of what they did, because when they win they will be asked to join the host for a few minutes.
We record the announcement and the acceptance speech and share it with you following the event.
After all the category winners are announced the host announces the overall winner. The overall winner is that entry which has received the highest score of all the entries.
Following the awards, we will send the trophies, winners logo and finalists logos to the finalists and of course celebrate the event with as much media and publicity as we can. We will feature many of the winners and judges in CXM, in case studies, in interviews, in webinars and in conferences.
We hope to engage and add value to our customers all year round not just at the events.
WHAT'S NEW THIS YEAR
A fully online awards experience No win no fee (well almost) Every company who makes the finals will be issued with a Finalist’s logo A new and improved set of categories Held on 16th July Abhishek Verma will be our new Awards Chairman The Judge Club Streamlined set of 7 scoring criteria
WHY ENTER
ENJOY much-deserved recognition for your hard work and accomplishments
EXPLAIN your insights into best practice and learn from fellow professionals
ENCOURAGE further innovation and raise your staff morale
EXPAND your profile and your business
ENHANCE your network by connecting with other influential business leaders
EFFECT positive changes to your business model with our Feedback Report
KEY DATES
Early bird entry deadline - 22nd May 2020
Entry deadline - 5th June 2020
Finalists Announced - 18th June 2020
Early bird booking deadline - 3rd July 2020
Booking deadline - 10h July 2020
Awards Finals - 16th July 2020
Who can enter the UKDXA?
We welcome entries from all organisations, teams and individuals - private and public sector - who have launched successful initiatives to improve the digital experience. You can be B2B or B2C, large or small - we want to hear from people with interesting and inspirational stories to share!
Who Wins the Awards?
Our judges recognise excellence and innovation no matter the size of the organisation. In our experience, SMEs and large corporations fare equally well in front of our panels of independent judges.
What kinds of initiatives can my company enter?
We want to hear from any company delivering outstanding business performance in their area, and who constantly strive to surpass customer expectations. From innovation to social enterprise to work environment, we welcome examples of all initiatives in business and industry.
The Journey
Guiding you through the awards journey, your dedicated awards consultant can advise you on all manner of queries: how to write your entry, how to present effectively, which award to enter, or any other questions you might have. We also provide many free resources online such as winner’s case studies, informative webinars, and our Customer Experience Magazine.
Why our Awards are Different
The UK Digital Experience Awards is run by Awards International. Founded in 2008 we’ve been encouraging and rewarding positive business practice, and doing it in a unique way for quite a while.
A large panel of independent and impartial judges - more than any other equivalent awards - give scores to the finalists on the day of the awards finals. We use transparent scoring criteria endorsed by Cranfield School of Management.
The conference-style awards are also designed to give finalists highly useful opportunities to network and share best practice ideas. The business leaders in attendance come from a diverse range of economic sectors - and this cross-fertilisation of business knowledge is extremely beneficial.
After the event, every single finalist receives a judges’ feedback report with detailed scores and comments on their entry. The fairness of this process has led to us receiving the Gold Trust Mark from the Independent Awards Standards Council.