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What is a roll up competition?
What is a roll up competition?

How roll up competitions work within OpenWater

Zack Schwartz avatar
Written by Zack Schwartz
Updated over a week ago

OpenWater offers an advanced configuration known as Roll Up Competitions. These competitions all follow a similar pattern: Local chapters or clubs run their own competition, somewhat autonomously. Submissions into these local competitions can roll up into a regional level or national competition to compete against submissions from the other local competitions.

OpenWater Functionality

When running a program at a child level (child meaning a sub organization of national or regional), you have autonomy over some elements, but limited functionality over others. 

National Level Admins

Administrators at the national or top-parent level have full access to all child organizations. If you are a regional level admin, you can access your child organizations, but not the organizations of other regions.

Autonomy Over

As a local administrator, you can control the following features for your competition.

  • Submission & Judging Dates

  • Some parts of the landing / home page content

  • Some parts of the Invoice Email and Invoice Template content

  • Sub-categories of existing categories defined by National Level

  • Submission fees

  • Confirmation email

  • Managing submissions / entrants

  • Managing judges / scores and results

  • Forwarding submissions to parent level organization

  • Running reports

  • Payment Gateway

No Control Over

  • The submission form

  • The judging form

  • Parent level categories

  • Round structure

  • Theme and public website

What is most important to understand about roll up competitions is that national level defines the rules and structure of the program. The submission form and judging criteria need to be standardized across the board for all child organizations. We have found that with some organizations, the different chapters had completely different ways of judging even the same categories. For a true roll up, there needs to be consistency, and so National defines the submission form which will be the same for all child organizations.

Categories

As described above, local administrators can add sub-categories to existing parent categories. But a common set of categories must be defined at the national level. National level can optionally choose to make a category only appear at a child level if the child defines sub-categories. And if National wants to allow child organizations to have categories that would exist at that level only and not roll up, they can create a parent level category called Local Only - and organizations can add sub-categories to that one.

When submissions get forwarded from a child's sub-category to a parent category, all submissions will compete at that parent level category.

Getting Started

Roll up configuration does come with an additional fee and setup. Talk to your support representative if you are interested in this option.

We generally recommend the following approach:

  1. We setup a google sign up form where your local administrators can sign their local chapter up and provide basic information.

  2. OpenWater will setup the local chapter and provide that local admin with access to manage their competition.

  3. Optional. A dedicated help center can be created for your local admins. See an example here.

Support

OpenWater's supported admin policy is still in effect for roll up competitions. Most common is that we provide support to the national level supported admins who then assist and provide support to their own local admins. Some customers prefer that all local admins be upgraded to supported admin status.

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