The person that registers is our key contact for all aspects of your organisation’s association with the Peer Awards. This role can be re-assigned for instance if the original contact changes job or leaves the organisation.
When it comes to submitting entries you may wish to assign a different key contact for each one as appropriate, so that all questions that come in can be directly responded to by the person with the best understanding of the initiative.

Any organisation is welcome to register and to participate in everything our community has to offer, from submitting their own entries to helping determine the winners, and attending events.
As far as submitting entries is concerned, we wish to avoid entries that are promotional. If your organisation offers/sells services/products in an area covered by one of our awards, then you can still submit an entry for that award in your organisation’s name, but it must not be seen to be promoting your products or services in any way.
You are also welcome to arrange for an entry to be submitted by or on behalf of a client of yours that would like to be acknowledged for their work with you in this area. Any client entries that are selected as Finalists and that you submit in this way can, if your client is agreeable, include mention of the contribution made by your company. The showcase page displayed at our website and the entry’s representation in our media exposure can include your logo and links to your website.

Ultimately the information we will require is the sort of material that you would put together if you were asked to speak about your initiative at a conference. So if and when your submission is nominated you could imagine what you would prepare were you to have ten minutes to present your entry to an audience of fellow-professionals, with supporting visuals if you like, followed by time to answer questions. The only difference is that this is being done online, with your audience viewing your prepared entry in their own time.

To save you time we have split this into a two-stage process, very similar to most awards in fact. For the submission stage you only need consider the text element of your entry. It is only when you know that your entry is nominated that you would put together the visuals for your presentation. This means you do not need to waste time on this if your entry is declined.

We need to know what you set out to achieve and how you went about this. This should include something about the impact your initiative has had or is having, something about how you have had to be creative – for instance in terms of what you are doing or how you are going about it, and something about what you have learned from the process and that your peer judges would find a useful “takeaway” for themselves from reading about your work.

Our guideline to judges is to allow ten minutes to review any single entry. And so your final material should not take any longer to absorb. It is with this in mind that we restrict content to not more than ten minutes worth of video and text combined (where text is rated at 300 words a minute).

It is best to submit your entry as soon as you are ready (such as when you are able to demonstrate that your initiative is having an impact). In this way you will have plenty of time to edit your entry and resubmit if initial feedback suggests that this could help, and you can enjoy the exposure that Finalists receive for a longer period of time. Also it means that your entry can be showcased at our website for a longer time.
Early entry is very strongly advised as popular award categories do tend to fill up and may become unavailable as time moves on.

Depending on the Entry Options you select, we can (once your fee is received in full) get back to you within a few days of receiving your entry.
Hopefully this will be to tell you that your entry has been nominated. If this is the case you may well value a conversation with us where we can explain fully about any next steps you may not be clear about. You will then be asked to submit your entry with any visuals that you would like to include in your online presentation to the judges, so that we can put it forward for peer review.
It could be that we are interested in your submission but would like further clarity. In this case (depending on the Entry Options you have selected) you would be invited or requested to resubmit some or all of the text elements. There is no charge for this service, so long as your re-submission takes place within the requested time period.
It could be that your entry is not nominated but we offer to feature it ‘out of competition’ by displaying it with visuals on a showcase page in the media.
And there may be some entries that we simply need to decline.

You are invited to supply visual support for your case to explain it overall and for each judging criteria. Our guideline to judges is to allow ten minutes to review any single entry. So your material should not take any longer to absorb. It is with this in mind that we restrict content to not more than ten minutes worth of video and text (where text is rated at 300 words a minute).
We will come back to you if we would like any changes made to your visuals, and may for reasons of length, suitability or quality exclude text or visual aspects of a presentation so that it may go forward for peer review.

All peers that review are verified by their work email, and we ensure that reviewers do not assess submissions from their own companies. Also we take the views of a number of peers into account, and don’t reach a decision based just on the first one or two reviews that come in.
We are keen to collect reviews even where there may be some bias, such as where the reviewers and the finalists are from companies in the same sector or country, as comments and feedback provided are still of interest, especially as the entries in question are likely to be among the ones that are of greatest personal interest to the reviewers. In these instances the ratings cast will simply not be taken into account in determining the winners. We are thinking here about ratings possibly being over-enthusiastic where the reviewer has been invited to participate by a finalist. Also where the rating might be overly critical because of direct competition, such as where the reviewer is also a finalist themselves but the entry is from an organisation in the same sector or is for the same award category as their entry.

It may happen that you decide that you would like to improve your submission whilst it is still undergoing the peer review process. This would require us to remove it from peer review, to ignore the ratings that we have so far accumulated for your entry, to again consider your re-submission for nomination, and to then re-introduce it for peer review – but by different people.
Such a re-submission would require a licence credit in the same was as a completely new submission would.

At any time a candidate can login to the system and on their Dashboard see some information about the status of their submission.
We plan that a candidate will be able to arrange to be alerted by email each time new information of interest becomes available.

We anticipate that this process can take anything from a few weeks to a few months, depending on a number of factors.
Where the reviews produce a consistent set of ratings then the judging can be completed quite speedily. It is the entries that produce a more mixed response that may take longer for a decision to be reached.

You will need to have access to your own Peer Awards Dashboard to perform a Peer Rating. Dashboards are provided to the person that registers, the person associated with an entry (in many cases these are one and the same person), and alongside any subscription you may have for more peer judges.
Each individual can cast just a single set of ratings for any one entry.
To ensure a level playing-field, each organisation may have just a single vote for any one entry – and this vote is a composite of all the ratings that were cast for that candidate by the same organisation. So, for the sake of argument, where you have three people judging the same entry, and two assign a rating of ‘9’ for Impact and one says ‘6’, then this is taken as a rating of ‘8’ for Impact from that organisation for that finalist.

Every Finalist is automatically included in the longlist for their award/sector and award/location. When the shortlists are announced, some very active award/sector and award/location combinations might be subdivided into two or more lists, and some less busy ones might be merged into a more general list.
There will be a shortlist for each category, where the categories will be along the lines we have outlined at the outset.
We also plan to announce shortlists for the strongest performing entries in each award.