How a Leading UK Public Relations Association Streamlined Payments
Category
Awards
Industry
Association (Public Relations)
How one of the UK's largest chartered public relations associations replaced manual invoicing with a single, integrated payment system for thousands of annual award entries.
Overview
Winning an award from the UK's only chartered public relations association is a career milestone for PR professionals and agencies alike. But behind the scenes, the association spent years struggling to collect registration fees through manual invoices and scattered credit card processes. Here's how they replaced that patchwork with a single branded, integrated payment system built to scale.
Program impact
6,000+ Entries managed every year
Process change
98% Of payments processed online
Scalable growth
1,000+ Entries submitted in the final 24 hours before close
Introduction
Before implementing a structured platform, this public relations association had struggled for years to collect registration fee payments from hundreds of entrants through a mix of manual invoices and credit card processing. As entry volume grew, so did the administrative burden of reconciling payments by hand.
The association needed a platform that could serve three very different groups well: entrants submitting work, judging committee members scoring it, and administrators overseeing the whole program all while reflecting the polish expected from an organization built around creative and communications excellence.
Challenges
Fragmented Payment Collection
Registration fees came in through a mix of manual invoices and credit card payments, with no single system tying entries to payment status.
Brand Consistency Requirements
As an organization built around creative excellence, the association needed the platform itself to match their website's look and feel a generic, off-brand portal wasn't an option.
Flexible Pricing Needs
The program required support for both early bird and standard registration rates, adding complexity to payment processing.
Balanced Judging Workloads
With hundreds of entries and a volunteer judging committee, entries needed to be distributed fairly based on each judge's specific expertise, not just evenly split.
Administrative Reporting Demands
Administrators needed to pull entry, payment, and review reports at any time without waiting on a manual export process.
Solution
Branded, White-Labeled Platform
The entry and review platform was styled to match the association's existing website, giving entrants and judges a consistent, professional experience from first click to submission.
Integrated Payment Processing
Registration payments connected directly into the association's existing payment processing system, with support for both early bird and standard rate tiers built in.
Intuitive Entry and Scoring Experience
Entrants completed a streamlined entry form, while judging committee members got a simple interface to view and score only the entries assigned to them.
Auto-Assignment by Expertise
Entries were automatically distributed across judges based on their specific areas of expertise, keeping review workloads balanced without manual assignment.
On-Demand Reporting
Administrators could extract entry, payment, and review reports at any time, without relying on a manual, one-off export process.
Results
What was once a patchwork of manual invoices and disconnected payment methods is now a single, scalable system that runs the entire award cycle from entry to payment to judging.
6,000+ entries managed annually the system reliably handles high entry volume every cycle.
98% of payments processed online: with the remaining 2% supported through offline options, so no entrant is turned away over payment method.
1,000+ entries submitted in the final 24 hours: the platform holds up under the last-minute surge every program experiences before close.
Balanced, expertise-based judge assignments: auto-assignment functionality distributes entries based on judge expertise rather than manual sorting.
More time for what matters: the association's team now spends less time on payment reconciliation and more time on recognizing and celebrating shortlisted entrants and winners.
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