Getting the entries in is the hard part, so congratulations on completing that step! You're probably now wondering what the next steps are for your competition configuration. From here, you will want to add your judges, get them set up with assignments, and open your judging dates for them to get started. You might also want to restrict what they can judge online so you can print score sheets and wall sheets. This guide is meant as a refresher on the next steps after the entry period has finished.

Getting Judging Set Up and Running

As long as an entry is marked as Complete in the system (you can view this by going to Entries >> View All, and checking the status) it is eligible for judging and will be ready to assign to a judge.

First, you will want to add your judges to the system.

Here's the guide on adding judges to the system. Note: At this stage, no auto-emails will go out to your judges, and they will not be alerted to log in.

Once set up, your judges will need assignments. This is how you decide what they will be able to review in the system and record a score for. You can either add the assignments to each judge manually (point and click at the assignments you want to give them), or you can do a bulk assignment (assigns a batch of entries based on rules, such as category).

Here's the guide for Manual Judging Assignment and here's the guide on Bulk Judging Assignment.

There are some clubs that like to do a combination of in-person judging and online judging. They want to assign the whole set of assignments, but only allow the judges access to one section of them before the in-person judging begins. This Restrict Judging feature will hide restricted entries from view in the judge portal, making it easy for judges to simply focus on the ones they should be working on. When the time comes to allow access to these other entries, the admin can simply unrestrict those categories and they will show up in the portal again.

Here's the guide on restricting categories for online judging.

An important step in the process is to open the judging period, officially kicking off the online judging. This is done by simply updating the open/close dates, so the open date for judging is in the past, and the close date for judging is in the future.

Here's the guide on setting judging dates.

When all of the above steps are done, it's time to let the judges know they can log in. This is done by the way of an email blast. 

Here's the guide on emailing judges.

You can also send one-off emails to judges, such as in the event you add a last minute judge after you've already sent out your main email blast. To do this, go to Judging >> View/Add Judges, click on the new judge's name, and on the next screen navigate to the Email tab. There will be a pre-populated email ready for you to send, or you might wish to edit it before sending.

Entry Admin (Printing Score Sheets, Downloading Entry Data, etc)

PRINTING SCORE SHEETS AND WALL SHEETS

If you are doing in-person judging, you might want to print out paper scoring sheets for the judges to use offline to record their score. The system will allow you to do this, as long as you have those judges added into the system and assigned with the entries they will be scoring (see above for those steps). The OpenWater menu for Print Outs will NOT show up until you have done these steps.

Here is the guide on printing score sheets and wall sheets.

The OpenWater system has capabilities to pull Finance reports, and Entry reports. You have the flexibility to pull reports containing, for example, just the Gold Winners, and we also have pre-coded specialty reports that will generate a script for your gala. Here are the guides on these: