WordPress for Toastmasters*
The contest tools available at contest.toastmost.org got a vigorous workout in a division contest held online for District 77, where I was invited to serve as chief judge. I came away with a few lessons learned, as well as ideas for improving the software.
One thing that happened is that overwhelmed judges either didn’t see or didn’t read the email notifications inviting them to set a password. So one important lesson for next time is to make sure Toastmasters who are not used to doing everything online get a proper orientation and are prompted to make sure they can sign onto the personalized judging links for the contest ahead of time.
In this case of the division contest I volunteered for, some judges never did get the hang of submitting their votes online, or did so inconsistently. One change I made to the software is to make it easier for the Chief Judge or Ballot Counters who have access to the password protected contest dashboard to record votes on a judge’s behalf.
I recommend that you have judges send you their votes by some other means as a backup. If you’re using Zoom, the private chat feature will work for that purpose. If you get their votes via private chat or email or text, you can record them so the dashboard will include their votes in the final ranking. (Without that feature, I had to resort to hustling together a quick spreadsheet to calculate and rank the totals).
In addition, if you’re setting up multiple contests rather than just one, and the same people will be acting as judges, timers, or ballot counters for each of them, you can import the settings from an event you set up previously.
Finally, I’ve added some additional error checking. I had one judge submit a blank ballot. The JavaScript code that was supposed to prevent that from happening apparently didn’t work properly, possibly because she was using an old version of Internet Explorer. I added an additional check to keep such votes from being recorded.
Suggestions on what else needs to be changed or improved are welcome.
