Product Update: Nominee 3.5 Introduces Anonymous Voting and Advanced Rubrics

We're excited to announce Nominee 3.5, a release focused on fairness, configurability, and workplace integration. Based on customer feedback, this update introduces anonymous voting for judges, a visual rubric builder, and expanded Slack automation to improve nomination flows.

Anonymous voting

Bias reduction is a top priority for many of our customers. The new anonymous voting mode ensures that judges evaluate submissions without seeing identifying details. Nominee 3.5 lets admins toggle anonymization per category and supports partial anonymization where necessary. We preserve audit logs for admins while keeping judge views blinded.

Advanced rubric builder

The visual rubric builder makes it easier to create compound criteria with weighted scores. Instead of simple numeric inputs, judges now see tooltips, examples, and aligned score descriptions (e.g., "5 - Demonstrable high impact with metrics"). The builder supports saving rubric templates for recurring events.

Slack automation enhancements

We added automated nomination nudges based on participation thresholds. If a team falls below the expected nomination rate, targeted messages can be triggered to managers or specific channels. Slack modal forms now support conditional fields so you can adapt the nomination question set based on category selection.

Other quality-of-life improvements

• Bulk importer for judges and nominations via CSV with improved error reporting.
• Accessibility improvements for screen reader support during judging.
• Exportable judge comment summaries for internal reporting.

Security and compliance updates

We've expanded audit logging and added granular role permissions to support enterprise governance. Admins can now configure data retention rules per event and export DPA-compliant logs for audit purposes.

Getting started

All customers will receive the update automatically. For existing events, anonymization is opt-in to avoid changing active judging behavior mid-cycle. We recommend testing the rubric builder on a sandbox event before applying to your main awards.

Feedback and roadmap

We built many of these features directly from customer requests. If you'd like to influence the roadmap, visit our community forum and upvote ideas. Next up are richer analytics dashboards and an API for deeper BI integrations.

"Our goal with 3.5 is to make the recognition process both fairer and easier to manage. These features help do both." — Product Lead, Nominee.app

Wrap-up

Nominee 3.5 is focused on operational fairness and scaling award operations with less manual effort. If you'd like a product walkthrough tailored to your organization's needs, schedule a demo with our team.