Guess who’s back, back again. Exemplar’s back. Tell a friend.
Wave 3 of the Judge Foundry Exemplar Program has arrived. It will open on Monday, April 6th and will close Tuesday, June 30th at midnight PST. East Coast folks have a little bit of spill over into the next day, but if you are done by midnight on the 30th you are fine. Judges will have the same number and types of slots as they did for the previous waves:
Level Based Slots:
L1s – 1 “any” slot per wave
L2s – 1 L1 slot per wave, 1 “any slot” per wave
L3s – 1 L1 slot per wave, 1 L2 slot per wave, 1 “Any” slot per wave.
L4s – 1 L1 slot per wave, 1 L2 slot per wave, 2 “Any” slot per wave.
L5s – 1 L1 slot per wave, 1 L2 slot per wave, 3 “Any” slot per wave.
Role Based Slots:
Regional Advocates – 3 Additional “Any” Slots
Area Communicators – 1 Additional “Any” Slot
Core Judge Foundry Project leads will receive additional “Any” slots tied to the size/scope of the respective project.
Update
One of the great things about Exemplar is our ability to iterate based on feedback. One bit of feedback we have received is that judges don’t really care about discount coupons to the Judge Foundry store as a result of receiving multiple nominations. You are probably even reading this and wondering, “wait, that was a thing?” It was. But the bar for redemption was too high, and interest was too low. So, starting with wave 3, that aspect of Exemplar is being sunset.
However, if we are taking something away, we want to replace it with something better (unlike some unnamed company). One of the most memorable parts of the legacy Exemplar program was receiving tokens with the nomination text on them. Folks still use those tokens, they were tangible memories and special. We tried to replicate that in the current iteration of Exemplar. Here too, we also fell short of the mark. We still made the token art, but because shipping is expensive, the mechanism for judges to get copies of the tokens was to print the tokens themselves. While reasonable in theory, in practice the idea was unexciting, and folks didn’t do it.
The last thing we want is for Exemplar to be unexciting. We want folks to be pumped when they get an Exemplar. We want the recognition to be memorable and impactful. We requested, and received a revised grant from Judge Foundry.
Starting with Wave 3, we will be printing and mailing tokens associated with Exemplar Recognitions.
We will even go back and print and mail tokens from Waves 1 and 2 when we send out Wave 3. We will continue this trend with future waves.
We are pretty excited about this change. It was something we wanted to do initially, but we were concerned about delivering with our starting budget. After having done this for two waves and a new grant request, we’re confident in the numbers. As with anything you try to do on a national scale, there will be some learning curves along the way, and we have faith in the Judge Communities ability to give us the grace needed to work through them.
Until next time, stay awesome