Customer story

BRITISH PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS

How the BPA consolidated nominations, judging, sponsors, and ceremony production onto a single platform.

Enterprise plan Founding customer Arts & culture
14
Award categories
1,500+
Annual nominations
25
Industry judges
~600
Ceremony guests

The challenge

The British Photography Awards is one of the UK's most established photography honours. Each year the programme processes over a thousand submissions across more than a dozen categories, coordinates a panel of industry judges, courts a portfolio of sponsors, and stages a full evening ceremony.

Before Accolade, the workflow lived across seven different tools, a survey platform for nominations, spreadsheets for judging, email threads for sponsors, a separate booking system for the ceremony, a chase-up of invoices in QuickBooks, and a printed table plan that got re-drawn at 2am on event day.

Every year, something broke. A judge would lose a scoring sheet. A sponsor deliverable would slip through the gaps. A nominee would be miscategorised on the night.

"We were running a major national awards programme on what amounted to a stack of spreadsheets. We needed one platform that understood the full arc, nomination to stage."
BPA Founder & Director

The move to Accolade

The BPA became one of Accolade's founding customers in early 2026, signing on as an Enterprise customer with the founder pricing offer. Migration took under a week.

What changed week one

"The AI Wizard pre-populated 80% of what we needed. We spent the rest of the morning refining it. By lunch we had a working awards programme."
BPA Founder & Director

The outcome

One source of truth

Every nominee, every judge score, every sponsor commitment, every guest, every supplier invoice now lives in one place. No more chasing the latest version of a spreadsheet.

Faster judging

Judges now score on web or mobile via a magic link. No log-in friction, no missing scoresheets. The conflict-of-interest checker auto-flags any judge with a declared relationship to a nominee.

Sponsors actually delivered against

Every sponsor agreement is now broken into deliverables (logo, mentions, table count, social posts) and ticked off as fulfilled. The end-of-event wrap report writes itself.

Ceremony night, calmer

The table planner re-seats in seconds, not hours. Check-in runs on tablets at the door. Run of Show feeds cues to the production team in real time.

Modules in production

Categories
Nominations
Judging
Winners
Sponsor CRM
Outreach
Proposals
Finance
Cashflow
Invoicing
Guest List
Table Planner
Tickets
Schedule
Run of Show
Speakers
Letters
Comms
Marketing
Press

WANT THE SAME SETUP?

Enterprise is £1,750/month and includes everything BPA uses, with founder pricing locked in for life.

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Case study reflects the BPA setup as of May 2026. Quotes are pending final approval and may be lightly edited before publication.