You want your audition registration to be easy, right? You also need it to be easy for audition admins and judges. Of course computers can help, but what system works best?
Hint: A pre-made audition form isn't going to make you're job easier. You need a system which automates task you're used to doing manually.
Figure Out What Need to Gather
First, write down what you need from entrants. For example, do you need:
Answers different types of questions (e.g. dates, open ended, multiple choice).
Online fee payment?
Uploads of files?
Uploads of large video files?
It's not only about the audition registration form, but how you will get all the the things you need from entrants AND, how you will get it to judges.
Does Your Audition Have Categories?
Are you running an audition with, for example, 20 different musical instruments? Does each category have different registration requirements? If so, a solution which works for a one-category audition might be a nightmare for your situation.
Your Options
1. Google Forms
If you use gmail or google suites for business, you have included access to Google Forms. Yes, its free, but it's only a realistic solutions for VERY small and SIMPLE auditions. After an entrant fills out a Google Form, the data from the form is placed into a Google Sheet. There are no other options to view the data. It is a very limited solution.
2. Generic Form Platforms
Generic online form platforms, such as Jotform and Zoho forms, provide a lot of options, including accepting payments and uploads. Jotform in particular as become the market-leader for general forms and has a lot of options.
The downside of these platforms for auditions include: hard to setup multi-category auditions, you still need to manually download entrant's information and uploads, one at a time! Then, you'd need to move all those files somewhere where judges can view. And if the files are large video files, it's going to be a nightmare.
Thus, for anything other than a simple audition, a generic form platform is going to be limiting.
3. Audition Specific Platforms
What if there were form systems designed specifically for auditions? Good news, there are! Interestingly, there are a good number of niche audition-specific systems available. For example, there are several acting/theater system designed specially for casting productions. For music auditions, there is GetAcceptd which is mostly geared toward college auditions and is very expensive.
Of course, you probably aren't surprised that I'm going to mention Snap Audition. As a father of two music students, I help with numerous auditions, and was surprised by how terrible the process tended to be. That's why I created Snap Audition - the system that solves are the limitations of the systems mentioned above, plus much more, oh and yes, it's affordable. Check it out.
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