Small Firms, Big Ideas: Are Your Design Awards Accessible to Everyone?

Most of the architects practicing today are part of small or solo firms — but most of the entries reaching a design awards jury aren't. In this recorded session, the Reviewr team walks through why that gap exists and what changes when a design awards program is rebuilt to close it.

The session opens with a bit of background on Reviewr: founded roughly 15 years ago by people who had personally been through application, judging, and admin roles across grants, scholarships, and award programs, and saw the same disconnect from every angle — a process that wasn't a great experience for anyone involved. That's the lens this session runs through, framed around today's specific topic: are your design awards accessible to everyone, is everyone able to see real progress and improvement year over year, and is the process a great one for every firm involved, not just the largest ones.

From there, the session names the mismatch directly. Entry requirements are often written for firms that already have a marketing department producing polished material, which means a submission becomes its own unpaid project layered on top of the actual design work — and if it's extra work that won't amount to anything, a lot of smaller firms simply don't start. Entry fees can price out a solo practitioner before they even submit. And categories built only for finished, fully-built work leave no room for smaller-scale or unbuilt projects, even when those projects are just as deserving of recognition. The result: entries that reach a jury skew toward a narrower slice of the profession than the one actually practicing, and a program meant to define excellence in architecture ends up calibrated to reward the firms with the staff to enter it — even though the majority of practicing architects are part of small or solo firms, not large ones.

The session is built around six ways to open the jury to the whole profession:

• Lighten the Submission Itself — Reworked forms, uploads, and documentation requirements that scale with the size of the project, not the size of the firm, so a smaller or unbuilt project isn't filling out the same submission as a fully-staffed, fully-built one. Applicants are routed to answer only the questions that are actually applicable to their entry, rather than a single generic form sized for the largest possible project, and every submission benefits automatically from Reviewr's updated question types and upload components compared to whatever process a program was using before.
• Scale the Cost of Entry — Tiered entry fees, processed in-house through Reviewr's built-in payment system rather than routed through a separate outside processor, so solo and small firms aren't paying the same ticket price as your largest applicants. Applicants are taken directly to a shopping cart on submission and aren't considered until payment clears, keeping everything in one place instead of requiring separate admin follow-up — and tiers are easy to adjust as entry volume and program costs change from year to year.
• Give Small & Unbuilt Work Its Own Stage — Categories built for smaller-scale, emerging, or unbuilt projects, including support for multi-stage competitions, so a project that isn't fully finished can still compete against genuine peers instead of being judged against completed, built work — or left out of the program entirely. More categories mean more firms see a real opportunity to apply, and categories are just as easy to scale back down if a program wants to simplify in a future cycle.
• Let the Design Win, Not the Budget — Weighted scorecards and shared judging criteria built around design merit, so a modest submission can score as strongly as a polished one on the strength of the idea, not the size of the budget behind it. Every juror scores from the same criteria, translated directly from the program's own values and priorities, so the decision reflects what the program actually wants to reward rather than which firm could afford the most production polish — and a modest, lower-budget submission is explicitly scored on equal footing with a larger, better-resourced one.
• Make Judging Something Jurors Want to Do Again — Custom scorecards for every category, clearer scoring than a bare 1–10 scale (moving instead toward expectation-based language like "does not meet expectations" through "exceeds expectations," since a flat number means something different to every juror and makes near-identical scores hard to explain), and AI-generated summaries that give volunteer jurors a baseline score and a quick synopsis before they dive into a full submission — without ever making the jury's final decision for them. All of it built to keep judges, most of whom are volunteering their time, willing to come back and judge again next cycle.
• Watch Who Actually Makes It Through — Participation tracked automatically by firm size at every stage, with built-in reports that replace the manual spreadsheets many admins are currently piecing together by hand. Reports show exactly where firms drop off, which question types and layouts are and aren't working, and can be pulled in a click and handed straight to leadership, whether it's this year's data or a comparison against last year's.

The session includes a direct recap of where design awards programs are falling short today: entry requirements written for firms with a marketing department already in place; solo practitioners and small studios treating submission as a second, unpaid project not worth the time or money; small-scale and unbuilt work with no category built for it, even when it's fully eligible for recognition at the stage it's in; production value and presentation polish doing the work design merit should be doing instead; jurors working through every submission at the same pace regardless of category; and no visibility into which firms are entering, advancing, or quietly opting out along the way. Looking forward, the session lays out what changes: forms that scale to the project as an automatic upgrade in Reviewr rather than a rebuild, tiered entry fees run through the platform, categories built specifically for small-scale, emerging, and unbuilt work, weighted criteria that keep the score focused on the design itself, custom scorecards for every category, and clear reports that show exactly where firms drop out so a program can prepare for its next cycle.

The key takeaway threaded through the session: an accessible program isn't a lower bar, it's the right bar — a higher standard that shows every size of firm the program cares about their work and gives them a real chance to be seen. Looking at the full picture, a wider door makes a stronger program: expanding categories to include more stages of a project's progress brings in more applicants and more quality applicants, and that growth reflects well on the profession and on the organization running the program, since it signals that every stage of a project's development is taken seriously.

It closes with a live walkthrough inside Reviewr, built with AIA Pittsburgh's own design awards program demo: account creation and automatically saved progress, so a designer who has to step away can log back in and pick up exactly where they left off; a look at the range of question types and file uploads available, all SOC 2 compliant so applicants can trust that their designs, budgets, and project documentation stay secure; essay-style prompts that let applicants showcase their work in their own words; and a reference and letter-of-recommendation process where references are invited directly into the system to submit or rank on the applicant's behalf, rather than relying solely on an uploaded letter, which helps even the playing field between strong and less-strong writers. On the judging side, the walkthrough covers the full judging portal: jurors see every submission they've been assigned, their own past scores and any outliers among them, the entire submission form on one side of the screen and their evaluation form and running total score on the other — all in one place, with no additional tabs or files to track down.

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