Running the Localtree Australian Business Awards 2026 on Awardova

A regional chamber of commerce set out to run its own business excellence awards program, and chose Awardova to configure and run the whole thing — the Localtree Australian Business Awards 2026. This post is a behind-the-scenes look at what went into setting it up, from the schedule down to the judge portal.

The award was built with its own timezone, Australia/Melbourne, so every stage window and deadline shown to nominees, entrants, judges and voters lines up with the organiser's own clock rather than a server default. Three categories were configured — Community Impact, Innovation in Service, and Emerging Business — each shaped around the kind of local businesses the chamber wanted to recognise.

Underneath the categories sits a schedule: a nominations window opens first, followed by an entries window for nominees and self-applicants to complete their submissions, then a judging window, and a public voting window running alongside it. Each stage has its own opening and closing dates, so the program moves through nominations, entries, judging and voting in order rather than all at once.

For the two judged categories, a rubric was set up with three criteria — quality, impact and presentation — giving judges a consistent structure to score every entry against, rather than leaving scoring to open-ended opinion.

The chamber's own site pages — a landing page introducing the awards, a sign-up page for entrants, and a dashboard for tracking an entry's progress — were assembled with Awardova's page builder, no code involved. Sponsors were added at their respective tiers to appear alongside the program.

Nominations came in as a CSV import, with the platform emailing each nominee a claim link so they could pick up their own entry and answer the category's questions directly, rather than the chamber re-keying every submission by hand. The organisation also connected its own mail service, so every nomination, entry and voting notification sent from the chamber's own address rather than a generic platform sender.

On the public side, voting ran with email verification — a vote only counted once the voter confirmed it from a link sent to their inbox — and the judge portal gave judges score sheets built from the category rubrics, with the ability to recuse themselves from an entry where appropriate.

The result is a program where nominations, entries, judging and public voting all run through one connected flow, configured entirely through the product rather than bespoke development. The full walkthrough of what was built is in our case study.