Voting Principles

• The three shows are judged as separate works - not comparative to each other - but as individual pieces by the online viewing audience.
• The audience will judge on quality of the script - not direction, acting or production. This is a playwriting competition.
• Directors, cast, crew and committee members may not vote for any of the plays with the exception of June Bland as Artistic Director.
• Each vote will have a total score of 30 - with the score out of 10 for Storyline, Characterisation, and Dialogue.
• For each production, the mean score is calculated across each of the plays and the highest average result is the winner. The purpose of the mean, or average score, is to give a scaled figure so that direct comparisons can be made between different sized samples. In other words, the mean is a like-for-like statistic so is a fair way of judging the three plays as a collective.
• June Bland , as our Artistic Director, will cast the decisive vote in the event of a draw. She will be asked to submit scores after seeing all three plays - awarding 10, 9 & 8 points - based on her view of the quality of writing. She has not seen or read any of the scripts to date, will not be aware of which plays have tied and her scores will only be calculated as part of the final results in the event of a draw. This will force a decisive result. 

Example

                 Mean             Draw Award   Total

                                                            (If required)

Play 1 1    9/30                        10               29

Play 2      19/30                        9               28

Play 3      18/30                        8                2

Voting Mechanism

• A short video will play at the beginning and end of each showcase demonstrating how to vote, and an email will be sent an hour before the performance with the voting link.
• All votes will take place online via a dedicated page on our website. As the showcase is a virtual event for which audience members must also book online, there should be no issue with their ability to vote online.
• Voting will  open directly after the show concludes (with a window of 48 hours before the voting page closes).
• Individuals will only be allowed to vote once per show and will be asked to submit their email and name as part of the online voting form. Any duplicate votes will be stripped out of the calculations.