For our competitions we have an office staff of three that audit the score sheet math, cover sheets, and info on the summary sheets as the judging flight concludes. After all the double checks they then stuff the score sheets into the pre-labeled participant mailing envelopes. One person gets the flight summary sheets and updates BCOE&M with the scores. During the award ceremony if the person isn't there to get their medal the same office staff folks immediately stuff the medal in the envelope. Score sheets usually get mailed out on the Tuesday or Wednesday following the competition and participants usually have them back by the weekend.
Suggestions:
- Get the 9x12 envelopes that open along the long side for easier stuffing.
- Put the number of paid & received entries for the participant on the mailing label so the office folks know the score sheet count for the envelope.
- Print two sets of address labels with the number of entries on them. One goes on the outside of the envelope for mailing, the other goes on the inside lip so the office staff can easily access to the envelope and see the participant name.
- Give the office staff a spreadsheet that they can sort by judging number, entry number, participant name, etc. Can be used for many things by the office staff while judging is going on.
Regarding scanning the sheets - I've yet to find a cost and time effective solution. I used to implement Electronic Medical Records systems and a part of that was implementing high capacity scanners (scan a patient paper chart in seconds), so I know a little about this. In order to do this you either need a decent scanner and someone that can manually save each scan with some kind of naming convention (i.e. judging number, participant name, etc.) or a scanner with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities so a scanning software program can read data off of a scanned sheet and automatically name the document for you. The first option is a time killer because of the scan time and the time it would take us to email 100 plus participants. The second option would require some costly equipment, can produce some rather large PDF files, and then there would be those 100 plus emails. I know some competitions have farmed out the scanning to a service after the competition has completed, but history has proven that volunteers tend to disappear into the woodwork once competitions are over. Yeah we could do a Google Drive or Dropbox folder share instead of emails but then that involves tech support to 100 plus participants.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to be able to do this but I've never had the budget and I've never had the volunteer time to pull it off. I'm in the stick them in the envelope and mail them off camp. Good luck with your competition!