Introduction
Nominations are often the first step in a variety of award processes, from faculty departmental awards to student employee recognition.
Challenges
- Nominations often involve one individual submitting materials or a recommendation on behalf of a nominee.
- Sometimes the nominee needs to be a part of the process, and other times they should not.
Solutions
- For these processes, we recommend using the Form Designer template, which allows more flexibility on the Requirements page.
- Integrate the nominee at the point it makes sense for your process (e.g., upon initial submission, during the review process, with an award notification at the end).
Tips
- First Name and Last Name will be required. Re-naming the fields and collecting the nominator info here usually makes the most sense because these fields auto-populate with the first and last name of the person submitting the form.
- If you add the Primary Organization field to the application form, this will also be pre-populated with the organization of the person submitting the form, so you may want to add an additional field to collect the nominee's organization.
- Application Title field - *Very important*: This field will populate in the Application Title field on the back end (Data Grid, reports, etc.). Because of this, re-name this field to collect some other valuable info, like the name(s) of the nominee(s).
- Reference Letters (if applicable): Customize the instructions and emails to letter writers. You can find more information about our tips in this article.
- Notifications: Because mail merge fields are used in several email template, you should make sure the {applicantName} and {application title} fields make sense in the messages, or remove them from the templates. The most common email templates you may want to edit are:
- Your Application Received (Applicant)
- Award Application (Applicant)
- Reject Application (Applicant)
- Review Request (Reviewer)
- Multiple Review Request (Reviewer)
- Integrating the nominee into the process
- Upon initial submission - Make sure they're copied in the "Add Contacts for Notifications" section.
- During the review process - Have them verify the nomination with Applicant-Driven Steps, or assign them as a "reviewer" to a specific routing step so they can add in more details not provided by the nominator.
- Award notification - Include them in the email as the final step.
Have more questions about this topic? Go to the Community Forum to pose the question to other users or submit a support ticket to InfoReady.