I had so much fun and hoping to use this in the future. Worth every single pennies I spent.

Considering this a scoring platform, but take it as an automation software which made everything essential, from organising your judges, assigning the scoring to the judges, and even calculating your average scores with an easy UI and commandable UX. It takes some time to learn but the best thing is the customer service themselves helped by assisting me with detailed walkthrough (through Microsoft Teams), and countless email of questions to which they assist me very well. The application and the scoring data can be downloaded easily as csv files, and even all applications can be in PDF forms. Truly appreciate it especially if you have to manually assign later on. I'd like to appreciate too how the team helped me initially when we encountered problems with my card (I couldn't pay through the website), but they invoiced me the payment (through email) and everything went well.

I really wish that sub-categories can be introduced because mainly categories only might not be sufficient for the data. In example, Category A and sub-category 1 (instead of separating them into categories only). Another thing is, you may need to cater your own tutorial (but it's not really difficult) for the judges considering the level of understanding and literacy.

Overall our experience with Zealous was positive - the platform is easy to use, the low pricing allowed us to forgive some of the (very small) annoyances and the excellent customer service throughout was also a strong bonus. We appreciate how welcoming they were of feedback and their desire to make improvements and changes to the functionality accordingly, so would definitely recommend Zealous and would be happy to use the platform again going forward. Our application numbers were up on the previous year.

Overall, Zealous was a good platform - it was relatively straight forward to set up and use and served it's purpose (in our case, collating entries for an industry awards event). The pricing structure was a huge improvement on the platform we had used prior which compensated for some of the features we lost by changing platforms. However, the best thing about Zealous is their customer service. Their team are very warm and friendly, no query is too much trouble and they are quick to respond to any queries. They also invite feedback in a way which made me feel that they really do want to continue improving, not just as a box-ticking exercise, and I have already been informed that some of our suggestions are being actioned which is really encouraging. It makes us feel valued as customers and makes it all the more likely that we will return year on year.

It would have been good to have been able to fully customise the forms - some of the language didn't really suit our audience (it is quite arts-centric) so we had to be creative in how we made the obligatory fields work for our applicants. It would also be great to have greater control over comms sent via the platform, i.e. reminders of application deadlines etc, which currently can't be sent en masse to those with applications in progress (they had to be done individually) and also can't be branded to our company. Both of these would be great features to have.

Thankfully there was excellent customer support that helped our problems be resolved

The public voting feature is a great tool for competition organizers

Sadly that there were some bugs while the public voting is live

The Zealous team has been really great at helping us manage our competitions and addressing our feedback. They are quick to respond and clearly value us even as a small customer.

We've been using Zealous for our Creative Future Writers' Award competition for several annual rounds. It's fairly easy to set up, quite customisable, and provides an excellent portal for us to collect and sort submissions. Initially we were hesitant about the potential for people submitting having problems with it, having to mediate their technical problems and/or hiccups, but these have been nearly non-existent. Previously we had an in-house portal on our website and as submissions rose year on year (from 300 to 1,500) it was really clear this wasn't working at all, and the level of manual administration was totally eliminated by transferring over to Zealous. From a user-end standpoint, it's very professional looking and incorporates all of our branding. Previously we received a much higher proportion of e-mail/postal entries and these have probably gone down significantly due to the ease of entering via Zealous.

We have found Zealous really flexible and easy to use. There are only a couple of minor aspects we're working with them on (scoring before the closing date and processing optional entry donations)--and Zealous is doing all they can to address these. Occasionally we've found submissions slow to load when reading them but I gather this has been fixed.

I cannot express how delighted and thankful I am with the Zealous product and the Zealous team. The platform is extremely easy to use for the administrators, entrants and judges alike. The process saved hundreds of hours as the site organizes the project, presents options for the contest as well as provides options for judging. The team at Zealous is extremely supportive and has a sincere interest in ensuring the event is structured in a way to ensure success. The contest was an essay contest for a US High School, and ease of use was a critical need. The number of entries received were double what was expected. This success is highly correlated to the professionalism of the platform the users saw, and the ease of use for High School Students is a very big deal. This essay contest was for students to document how Covid-19 has impacted them, in 2020. It is likely the essay contest would not have taken place had it not been for Zealous. Thank you [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] - you are rock stars! If you are deciding on a platform to use for your contest, stop here and use Zealous.

The software was extremely flexible to use and was able to be modified to fit the needs of the Contest. The entrants are students, and some of the judges are also students, so anonymous judging was required. The contest was set up so the entrants would have minimal questions (i.e., distractions) to answer prior to entering the contest. We had a lower than expected drop out rate from initial review of contest to actual entry to contest, which is a huge win. The contest also required a large number of judges, from students, alumni of the school, and community members. This was also easily accommodated in zealous.co. The results of the contest will be posted on various local, state and ideally national museums and archives. A huge shout out to Zealous.co who has a flexible product that performs and is part of this historical process. Well done.

Nothing. The product met the objectives of the essay contest with clear guidelines, and ease of use for administrators, judges and entrants, as well as the museums who will be archiving this information.