OpenWater Awards Reviews in June 2025: User Ratings, Pros & Cons

Fantastic solution to streamline our awards

What do you like best? OpenWater has taken our Association Awards program from multiple spreadsheets and surveys to one streamlined process that allows us to be much more efficient. What do you dislike? Like any program it takes a little bit of time to understand all of its capabilities, but once oyu understand you realize the full potential of the software. What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized? We are gaining staff time back and also ...

Just a hassle

What do you like best? The system collects all the info we need from submitters. What do you dislike? It is not user-friendly. It is extremely difficult to view all the submission information at once. It takes multiple steps to do anything. It makes everything complicated. Recommendations to others considering the product: Look at other options. It is not intuitive or user-friendly. What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized? We used it ...

A very adaptable solution.

What do you like best? We weren't actively looking for a contest management solution but a Sales representative reached out to gauge our interest in OpenWater, after hearing about our Construction Intern Awards scholarship program. Up until that point we had been using Wordpress to manage this competition, which included a lot of manual maintenance, popular voting plugins, a bulky media gathering process, entry content display delays, and several other headaches. On top of that, we had ...

Makes our members happy!

What do you like best? I like that we CAN integrate this software into our database and have our users log in using their credentials used in our site and have some fields pre-populated. What do you dislike? The multiple ways to access the emails and the judging settings. It would be easier to have a main area on the dashboard of the admin panel and be able to tie the information to a program. Would like to eliminate the number of places to remember to go set up. It also does not tie ...

Great product

What do you like best? The best aspect of OpenWater is definitely the customer service. There are people who are always on hand to answer any question or issue you might have. In addition, OpenWater is intuitive and easy to use. What do you dislike? If you have very specific criteria you are trying to fulfill, it could be tricky trying to set up OpenWater. In addition, there are a few tips/tricks that take a while to get used to. I'm also wondering if there's a way to use OpenWater's ...

Love Open Water

What do you like best? I love OpenWater. Not only is the system easy to use and to customize to your specific program, but the customer service is phenomenal. Any time i have a question or concern they respond immediately, and also do our external client-facing customer service as well. What do you dislike? We are currently working with our support reps to add in a few more layers of customization. Part of OpenWater's excellent price point is that we do a bit more of the heavy lifting ...

Exceptional Customer Service

What do you like best? OpenWater has allowed us to take a very manual abstract process and turn it into a much more digital format which has eliminated hours of staff time. The best part is the exceptional customer service we receive from the OpenWater team. They have been tremendous and so responsive. What do you dislike? The only thing that is somewhat uncomfortable is the growing pains of learning a new system but really the OpenWater team has been incredibly helpful through it too. ...

Efficient platform for multiple award program managment

What do you like best? The ease of use for managing multiple award programs has been great. Templates that can be used between different programs are easy to construct and reuse. Over the past 2 years, I've managed 7 different programs with different flavors (sector-focused awards, broad campus-wide applications, rolling basis grant applications, post-award grant reporting progress tools). The customer service has been above and beyond what I expected. What do you dislike? The number ...

The Challenges of a Complex, Multi-layered Awards Program

What do you like best? OpenWater took on my association's extremely complex and multi-layered awards program and has answered every challenge we have encountered with setting up the program initially, running it through the first two seasons and making it easy to use for our members. Their response and support have been top shelf. Each time we have hit a roadblock, OpenWater has provided solutions that answer the need and improve the program. What do you dislike? OpenWater prefers ...

Easy to Enter, Easy to Judge, Easy to Manage

What do you like best? We're just wrapping up our fourth annual awards program with OpenWater. The entrants find the entry process to be straight forward, and the judges appreciate the simplicity of the judging process. It's easy to run a successful program with OpenWater. What do you dislike? Figuring out the category groups and which questions show on the entry form for each category group is somewhat difficult to figure out. Recommendations to others considering the product: ...