After a marathon nominations phase lasting nearly 9 months, this year’s shortlists and voting in the National Fenestration Awards have gone live. As part of the NFA team running the awards, I can honestly say that this has been the biggest and most engaged awards so far.
The finalists
I won’t list all the finalists here, it will take far too long. But if you click here, you’ll be able to view each and every finalists, organised by category.
What I will say is that I personally believe that this year’s line up of finalists is the strongest we have ever had. At the end of the planning meeting where we compiled the shortlists, we all agreed that this was easily the strongest line up up finalists we had ever had.
It was also great to see a load of new names enter the fray. One thing I am keen to promote with the NFAs is new names and fresh faces. Not just the ones that everyone already knows about. There is great work going on all over the place and that’s what these awards will try and demonstrate.
Categories
We started out the nominations phase with a total of 19 categories. It was a huge number compared to the 13 in the previous year, and 11 the year before that. But there were areas of the industry we were determined to give representation to, so we expanded it to 19.
We thought that at 19, this was as big as any awards should do. It was at risk of becoming cumbersome if it were to have any more categories.
In the end we were able to carry 17 of those 19 categories through to the shotrlists phase. Unfortunately the Steel category got little love. There does seem to be a struggle for this industry to recognise it’s steel side. Which is a shame as it has such massive heritage in the sector. So in the end we could not carry that through. We also had to drop the Customer Service category as that didn’t garner enough nominations to produce a shortlist from. I think in the future we will have to give that a re-think on how people can take part in a category like that.
Still, 17 out of 19 ain’t bad!
Voting
Voting is now live and will run up until midnight on Monday 30th November. After that point, voting will close and this year’s competition will close.
Because of the large nature of the NFAs this year, we have had to set it up slightly differently. Firstly there is a shortlists dashboard. This place’s sole purpose is to allow people to browse the finalists in each category. People can click on a shortlist and be taken to a page which lists them all, and can view any of the live profile pages that are up there too.
People can then go to a dedicated voting page, which can be accessed once registered and logged in. From that single page people will be able to vote on as many of the different categories as they wish. This page is now the only page that is restricted to registered users only.
The set up is a bit different to the previous years, so if you’re going to take part in the voting, please take a minute to get used to the new navigation.
I want to say a big personal thanks to The VEKA UK Group, Window Ware, GQA Qualifications, Kolorseal, Windowbase, Solidor and Liniar for their support of the awards. This third year is the biggest yet, and their support and backing has ensured that the NFAs can continue to grow and positively impact the industry we all care passionately about. So thanks!
