Design competitions are widely popular in the floral industry but, even more importantly, they play a vital role in the economics of floral industry associations and their shows and conventions. Simply put design competitions are what make a lot of associations, conventions and shows viable.
The problem is that they have generally relied on the incredible effort of volunteers that worked long hours tallying, checking and rechecking scoresheets. This of course introduced the possibility of human error, and getting good output/feedback (in the form of certificates, scoresheets, etc.).
FloristWare is committed to these associations and their shows and grateful to these volunteers for the urgent role they play in sustaining the floral industry so we introduced a special scoring/testing app to make running floral design competitions (and certification/testing) easier than it has even been before. It eliminates human error and provides instant results.
But this is only the start. The FloristWare scoring/testing app also makes it easy to provide much more meaningful feedback to competitors. Judges can add detailed comments, and include photos and/or videos that highlight the strengths and/or weaknesses of a design.
The FloristWare design competition scoring/testing app was first used in the real world in March of 2020. Almost immediately thereafter covid lockdowns swept the world and in-person events were put on hold so we introduced an online version.
"I would like to say thank you to Mark Anderson and the team at FloristWare for their help and support developing and implementing the evaluation platform used for our 2021 Great Lakes Floral Association Design Contest. It was very easy for our team of professional evaluators to use and eliminated any chance for human error when tabulating the scores for each contestant."
To date the in-person and online versions of this app have been used by prestigious organizations and events like the AIFD Foundation, the Great Lakes Floral Expo Designer of the Year Competition, the Gateway to the Americas Cup, the Arkansas Cup and Mid-America Cup and the Sylvia Cup and SAF Outstanding Varieties competitions.
In December of 2023 the American Institute of Floral Designers (AIFD) selected FloristWare to provide scoring software for the AIFD Student Competition and build a new system for the AIFD Professional Floral Design Evaluation (PFDE®). After testing at Northeast and Southern Chapter events over the winter these new solutions were rolled out at the 2024 AIFD Symposium in Orlando.
If your association or event is interested in a better, easier-to-manage design competition or exam please contact Mark Anderson at 888.531.3012.
"It was amazing and so easy! The actual judging was faster and of course the scores were done immediately. We were done 12 hours and a migraine earlier. "
Past Competitions
- 2020 GLFA Designer of The Year
- 2021 AIFD Foundation Just Make It Pretty Competition
- 2022 GLFA Designer of The Year
- 2022 Gateway to the Americas Cup
- 2023 GLFA Designer of The Year
- 2023 Arkansas Cup
- 2023 Mid-America Cup
- 2023 Sylvia Cup
- 2023 SAF Outstanding Varieties
- 2024 GLFA Designer of The Year
- 2024 AIFD Southern Chapter Student Design Competition
- 2024 FSFA Designer of the Year
- 2024 International Tablescape Competition
- 2024 Sunshine Cup
- 2024 FernTrust Cup
- 2024 AIFD Student Design Competition
- 2024 Arkansas Cup
- 2024 Mid-America Cup
- 2024 Sylvia Cup
- 2024 SAF Outstanding Varieties
- 2024 Gateway to the Americas Cup
- 2024 AIFD "Designs of the Decades" Competition
- 2025 GLFA Designer of The Year
- 2025 WUMFA Designer of The Year
Future Commitments
- 2025 AIFD "Designs of the Decades" Competition
- 2025 FSFA Designer of the Year
- 2025 AIFD Student Design Competition
- 2025 SAF Sylvia Cup
- 2025 SAF Outstanding Varieties
- 2025 Arkansas Cup
- 2025 Mid-America Cup
- 2026 Gateway to the Americas Cup
Features
The FloristWare design competition scoring app has been used by many different contest over several years and has been refined to include features that can make it work for almost any competition in the future:
Real Time Organizer Results
Competition organizers often need results immediately so that they can determine who advances to the next round, make announcements, etc. The FloristWare scoring app make that easy – rankings are available in real time as soon as judging is complete.
Informative & Inspiring Competitor Feedback
Competing can require a big investment of both time and money for designers. Our scoring app rewards them with detailed results documentation – refined over dozens of competitions, discussions and focus groups – that is full of actionable and inspiring feedback. It shows competitors where they need to focus in future events. It also finds and highlights the bright spots for every participant to keep them excited about competing. The goal is to give them every possible reason to want to continue participating in your competition.
Flexible Categories For Divisions, Themes And Aggregate Results
The app allows for great flexibility with themes and divisions, and allows for aggregate reporting/rankings.
Aggregate Results By School or Shop
The system can also provide real time rankings based on the school or shop the designer is associated with. Most organizers want more participation in their contests and this is a powerful tool for driving just that. Schools and shops are encouraged to enter more designers to improve their chances of winning a title.
Penalties & Disqualifications
Organizers can disqualify entries and/or deduct points for violating guidelines.
Photo Capture & Organization
The app also walks volunteers through the process of capturing photos of every designer/entry and then names and files them by competitor name/theme/division so you end up with an organized folders of photographs that are easy to work with.
"I don't even know how to say thank you enough for creating a revolutionary floral judging/scoring system! I am extremely grateful for this amazing technology."
"Your scoring system changed our life’s last year at convention. "
"Thank you again for creating and setting us up with your software – it went really smooth! This is a great upgrade to both (Sylvia Cup and Outstanding Varieties) competitions – thank you!!"
"Judging with your iPads and software was so perfect. Thank you for all of your help."
AIFD Professional Floral Design Evaluation (PFDE)
In 2023 FloristWare was contracted by the American Institute of Floral Designers (AIFD) to build a new scoring app that would help streamline the PFDE process.
The Professional Floral Design Evaluation requires a large team of volunteers (3 photographers, 7 supervisors from the membership team and 20+ evaluators) to monitor, photograph and evaluate five different designs from approximately 100 PFDE candidates over two days. It's a time consuming and rigorous process but the plateform we built for our scoring app, combined with the lessons learned from assisting with various floral design competitions over the years, allowed for the rapid development of a new application.
It was tested at the AIFD Southern Chapter mock evaluation in March of 2024 and then used for the official 2024 PFDE evaluation in Orlando. It worked as hoped, making the overall process more efficient and addressing several shortcomings with the previous system. Candidates all received their results in a new format that provided more context and actionable feedback.
The 2025 evaluation will present new challenges due to a shortened timeline, and FloristWare will again be on hand to provide the app and assistance.
SAF Oustanding Varieties Competition
In 2023 modified we modified our scoring platform to make it compatible with the Outstanding Varieties Competition hosted by SAF (the Society of American Florists).
This competition gives growers and breeders from around the world an opportunity to showcase their outstanding varieties during the SAF Annual Convention. Once again the FloristWare scoring app made the process faster and more efficient, and it was used again in 2024.
This special version of the FloristWare Scoring app will be used to score the Outstanding Varieties Competition again at the 2025 convention but with an exciting new addition: a Peoples Choice feature that will allow all those in attendance to vote for their favorites.