BRITISH PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS

The challenge

The British Photography Awards is one of the UK's most established photography honours. Each year the programme takes public submissions across its fourteen 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.

The move to Accolade

The British Photography Awards became one of Accolade's founding customers in early 2026, on the Enterprise plan. Migration took under a week.

What changed week one

• All 14 categories and the judging workflow rebuilt in the AI Setup Wizard in under an hour
• Public nomination link went live the same day, shared on social and to the existing database
• Judging panel onboarded via magic links, no passwords to remember
• Sponsor pipeline migrated from spreadsheets into the Partners station
• White-label deployed on the BPA's own subdomain

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.