How to be a GOOD Judge – Judging Process & Guidelines

This page provides a clear understanding of your responsibilities as a judge and helps to create consistent scoring across the panel. A judging brief will be sent via email when your entries are available for evaluation.

AwardStage Login

https://globalgoodawards.awardstage.com

Stages & Timeline

Main Judging Round (Online)

The main part of your judging will be done online using a sophisticated and user-friendly platform called AwardStage. You’ll be scoring the individual entries, not selecting the winners. You’ll be sent a brief closer to the time.

Due Diligence Investigative Research

Two selected judges will undertake online investigative research on the highest scoring entries. If any controversial research is found, this will be reported to the 3 judges for that category on Judging Day, and it will be up to them to decide the course of action.

Judging Day (In-person)

On Judging Day, we ask that ALL judges attend (or as a minimum, join in the discussions for their categories virtually within their group) to decide on the winners. GGA does not purely reward based on online scoring; but by bringing the judges together to discuss and agree to make their final decisions.

Judging & Scoring Guidelines

GGAs Purpose

The purpose of the GGAs is to encourage excellence in purpose-driven sustainability. As such, we aim to choose winners who exemplify that excellence and so can encourage others to follow their example. So, the job of judges is to choose the winners who do that. Not rewarding for aims, targets and roadmaps, only action.

When doing so, judges should base their decisions primarily on the entrant’s application. As experts in their field, they may also choose to draw on their own wider knowledge, whether from past experience or via online research. That said, entrants cannot expect any information which is not included in their application to be taken into consideration, and so should ensure all relevant material which may influence judges is included there.

GGAs aim is to balance equity across the judging process. We don’t want to knock an entrant for bad writing; remember that some are not writing in their first language, and some are very small innovative businesses with limited budgets. Also, what’s not innovative in the UK and easy to implement might not be the case in their country.

Scoring

Judges are asked to score on a scale of 0-10 (in ½ increments) each entry’s performance against its category’s criteria. Please follow these rough guidelines below as you do so, to ensure some degree of consistency between judges:

• Outstanding – Compelling, robust, fully evidenced description (8-10)
• Great – Very good story with some strong evidence (6-8)
• Adequate – Good, well‐evidenced description (4-6)
• Limited – Some weak areas, would have benefited from more evidence (2-4)
• Weak – Unconvincing, weakly evidenced description (0-2)

Exclusions and ‘Red Lines’

There has been much discussion around the exclusion of some sectors from entering. The very definition of being a ‘sustainable’ or ‘ethical’ company is very grey, so we let our judges decide with the added ‘due diligence’ stage in the judging process.

We have decided upon the following, which has been outlined in the Terms & Conditions made available to all entrants.

Applications will be scrutinised by our extensive panel of experienced judges. They reach their decisions based on informed and thoughtful consideration and discussion, and those decisions are final. While we do not exclude any sectors from entering, we would expect in the case of contentious or problematic ones to see strong signs of a proven commitment to transformational change, along with evidence that this is well underway. Without that, it’s highly unlikely that the entry would proceed. Global Good Awards reserve the right to exclude from further consideration any entry which might in its eyes pose a risk to the reputation and credibility of the Awards.

Providing Feedback

Judges are required to provide brief, honest, constructive feedback on each application, which will be sent to the entrant. This is an entrant benefit, promised to them prior to entry, which we must honor. If you’re unable to commit to this, please contact Karen.

We’ve simplified the process, and we are no longer asking judges to give feedback on each criterion. Instead, to just give one short piece of overall feedback at the end in ‘Overall Comments’. Remember: this is not for your notes; it’s to share with the entrant.

Don’t be scared to give criticism; the entrant does not see the judges’ name, only the score and comments. Entrants need practical and constructive criticism with examples of where improvements can be made and what could give them a better chance of winning and more importantly an opportunity to improve their impact.

NB: Please do avoid using language that suggests it’s a winning entry or it’s your favourite etc. Although it may be your personal opinion, some entries – where competition is fierce – may not win or even make the shortlist.

Here are some examples of GOOD feedback:

• A good business model with a solid purpose and great future potential – perhaps slightly premature for the award submission at this stage due to the lack of evidence to be produced across all of the criteria.

• You have made great reference to the work you have done such as 100% renewable energy, 100% electric owned vehicles and elimination of air freight, but you haven’t demonstrated the actual carbon savings. You may not have a baseline, so suggest to look at what the carbon footprint would be like in a scenario of not having done all these amazing initiatives, and then work out your savings if you’d started from this point. Also, suggest measuring your carbon emissions and have a net zero transition and a plan how to deal with residue emissions in the future.

• An exceptional campaign with impressively wide reach of beneficiaries, engagement of partners and influence of media and policy. The only thing missing for me is whether people are now more numerate or how active they are in continuing their numeric development since the programme was implemented.

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