The Challenge: The Webby Awards were entering their tenth year as the “Oscars of the Internet.” Unfortunately their site and their identity had not evolved in that time, even while the Internet as a whole had made tremendous strides, and had undergone several monumental changes.

Additionally, revenue was down on awards entries, as were residual sales to award winners. The Webby Awards needed a new identity, several new websites and a renewed digital strategy to increase revenue and re-establish the brand’s relevance in a marketplace fraught with increased competition from other interactive awards shows.

What We Did to Make it Awesome: The Barbarian Group attacked the Webby’s challenges with a wholesale redesign of the brand, along with a comprehensive digital strategy, implementing new Web 2.0 functionality and instilling a community ethos into the redesign of three separate sites: The Webby Awards site, the People’s Voice site – the most popular of the Webbys’ sites – and the site for the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences – the parent organization. By encouraging community participation in the sites and allowing the people to re-establish their voice in not just voting but in sharing, commenting and tagging various past and future winners.

The Results: Voting participation has more than doubled from the 2006 awards show. Site traffic to all three sites has increased more than 40% since launch. The People’s Voice site had over 25,000 comments left on various entries, and the renewed digital strategy has been cited in countless articles and blogs, creating a renewed sense of buzz and thought leadership for The Webby Awards.

The Webby Awards have a complicated process for managing entrants and determining winners. They accept submissions and payments, they pay reviewers, and they manage huge amounts of data across the board. Their old perl and PHP systems developed in the late 90s weren’t cutting it anymore, and they needed a more usable and capable solution. We designed and developed a Rails app that allowed organizations to submit their sites for review (Call for Entries), and for paid reviewers to review these sites (Reviewer).

Call For Entries allows people to sign up and submit sites for consideration in The Webby Awards. Payment is processed by a custom credit card processing component, and a robust admin system that is used to manage user accounts, submitted sites, orders, and provides a variety of cash flow and other statistical exports. The Webbys Reviewer app allows members of the general public to apply to become paid reviewers. We built the application submission and acceptance system and the mechanism for these people to review sites in their assigned categories. A configurable invoicing system was developed to assist determining how much to pay out to these reviewers, based on the types of sites reviews and number of submitted reviews.
Data management was streamlined by building these apps with a unified administration system, ensuring consistency between the apps and allows for high level views of how the submitted sites were subsequently reviews down the line.