Imagine judging an art competition—and having more than 100,000 artists show up to compete. That’s what Google tackles each year with the Doodle 4 Google contest, inviting student artists across the country to redesign the Google logo.

This year, for the 5^th annual contest, Google tapped Tenthwave to help them process
the entries and streamline the judging. We leveraged our expertise in managing promotions and developing custom digital apps to come up with a winning solution. We cut four days off of the processing time, and assured that the flow of entries never stopped during the judging period (an issue in years past). How did we do it?

Tenthwave paired old-school hand-sorting with a specially-developed digital judging tool. As the entries poured in, we scanned them, coded them and loaded them into Webjudge, our user-friendly online judging tool. Since Google’s judges include employees and celebrity guests from across the country, we made sure each judge could easily browse submissions—from any location at a time during the judging period. Several judges noted that they were very pleased with the tool, which they found easy to use and a great way to get through the entries quickly.

Once the judges selected the 50 finalists (one from each state), those entries were
retrieved and scanned at higher resolution. Google presented these works of art for a public vote, and after millions of votes the winning entry—titled “Pirate Times,” by second grader Dylan Hoffman of Caledonia, WI—appeared on the Google homepage on May 18.

We’re proud to have helped Google crown another winner, who also received a $30,000 scholarship. Our carefully designed entry process and judging tool insured that the enormous volume of entries was processed quickly and hundreds of judges were able to participate in selecting finalists simultaneously.

Can’t wait for next year!