Ultimately aiming to define coliving as an institutionalised, scalable, and thriving real estate model. This initiative serves a diverse range of stakeholders, from coliving operators and designers to architects, investors, and tech providers
The Coliving Awards is the first dedicated awards ceremony designed to highlight key innovations, actions, and ideas shaping the global coliving industry. Its mission is to recognise excellence, foster innovation, and establish a quality standard in the sector.
Before the Coliving Awards, the rapidly growing coliving sector faced a critical void:
A lack of a prestigious, centralised platform to formally acknowledge and celebrate the outstanding talent, innovative projects, and disruptive ideas within the industry. This left significant contributions unhighlighted.
No established, authoritative body existed to define or identify best practices, making it challenging for industry players to benchmark performance, understand market positioning, or identify true excellence.
Pioneering companies and individuals struggled to gain broad visibility for their contributions, impeding market reach and the formation of valuable partnerships.
The absence of a unified event for celebrating achievements meant missed opportunities for industry-wide connection, inspiration, and community building.
Building a global awards platform with complex submission, judging, and showcasing functionalities, even with a no-code approach, presented several technical and integration challenges:
Consolidating diverse data (project details, participant information, judging scores, winner status) into a unified, searchable, and easily manageable system while maintaining data integrity and relationships.
A primary challenge was ensuring that different user roles (submitters or judges) saw only the content relevant and permissible to them. For instance, judges needed to see only the submissions assigned for their evaluation, while participants could only view and edit their own submitted projects. This required intricate logic for content visibility and access control across the platform.
Designing a robust system capable of handling a high volume of concurrent submissions while providing a secure, intuitive, and dedicated environment for expert jury members to efficiently evaluate projects, ensuring data integrity and user experience under pressure.
Integrating the functionality for participants to purchase additional project submissions directly from their account dashboard, requiring seamless payment processing and immediate update of their submission quotas.
Our deep understanding of each no-code tool's functionalities combined with a smart way of integration allowed us to effectively navigate these complexities. We tackled each challenge with strategic planning and expert execution:
Unified data backbone for project and participant data, dynamically connected with Google solutions for robust storage. This content is then meticulously organised within CMS, utilising its advanced filtering, referencing, and multi-referencing capabilities for consistent taxonomy and easy retrieval across all platform modules.
Granular, role-based access control through Webflow and Outseta. This ensures judges see only relevant submissions for evaluation, while participants exclusively view and edit their own projects. Personalised portals also empower users to purchase additional submissions directly from their accounts, streamlining management.
Orchestrating the entire complex awards workflow includes seamless, automated transitions for project submissions through all stages, from initial entry and payment confirmation to judging assignments and public voting triggers, ensuring a streamlined and role-aware journey for everyone involved.
We crafted robust integration bridges using Integration Microservice and custom code to ensure seamless data synchronisation across all platforms. This connected Stripe for secure payments and comprehensive CRM for segmented email marketing, and Google products for data management.
The platform is meticulously optimised for global reach and discoverability. This involves leveraging powerful CMS features for effortless content localisation across different regions, coupled with comprehensive SEO strategies to maximize visibility across international search engines.
Our information architecture is thoughtfully structured to guide every user through the site.
We've segregated key stakeholders into user-type specific flows like the Jury Portal and Applicant Portal.
→ Clean, responsive website for showcasing submissions, and legacy of Coliving Awards - past editions, jurors,
→ Manages dynamic content: Jurors, User Accounts, User Submissions, Partners, Sponsors, Past Editions
→ User authentication & membership tier control
→ CRM to manage subscribers, partners, and contributors
→ Automated onboarding
→ Protected content via user authentication
→ Conditional Visibility based on Type of Access
→ Allows additional purchases via User Account > Plan - additional Submissions purchase
→ Automates new signups, contributor submission flow, newsletter sign-ups
→ Manages user submissions - viewing of personal submissions, adjusting
→ Stores Files - Sends submission files to database with proper naming and formatting
→ Keeps track of submissions, stores submission documents
→ Captures Legitimate Interest - Newsletter Sign ups
→ Supports processing payments
→ Integration with CRM - account creation, person creation, notifications regarding support tickets submitted
→ Filtering displayed data by user logged
→ Clean, responsive website for showcasing submissions, and legacy of Coliving Awards - past editions, jurors,
→ Manages dynamic content: Jurors, User Accounts, User Submissions, Partners, Sponsors, Past Editions
→ User authentication & membership tier control
→ CRM to manage subscribers, partners, and contributors
→ Automated onboarding
→ Protected content via user authentication
→ Conditional Visibility based on Type of Access
→ Allows additional purchases via User Account > Plan - additional Submissions purchase
→ Automates new signups, contributor submission flow, newsletter sign-ups
→ Manages user submissions - viewing of personal submissions, adjusting
→ Stores Files - Sends submission files to Google Drive with proper naming and formatting
→ Keeps track of submissions, stores submission documents
→ Captures Legitimate Interest - Newsletter Sign ups
→ Supports processing payments
→ Integration with Outseta - account creation, person creation, notifications regarding support tickets submitted
→ Filtering displayed data by user logged
Building Coliving Awards platform reaffirmed the immense power of a strategic, user-centric approach combined with the agility of no-code development. Our key learnings from this project include:
Demonstrates that sophisticated, integrated platforms are entirely achievable without traditional coding, offering significant advantages in speed and cost.
A well-thought-out structure is crucial for managing vast amounts of content and diverse user journeys.
Designing with independent yet interconnected tools ensures the platform can grow and adapt efficiently to evolving market needs and increasing user demands.
Automating processes across different tools not only saves time but also ensures data accuracy and a seamless user experience.
By deeply understanding the industry's pain points and designing solutions directly addressing them, Coliving Awards truly empowers its stakeholders and strengthens collective PR.
