Thank you for your interest in being a judge for this year's Community Radio Awards.

As ever we are looking for a variety of judges from across a wide range of areas to include community, commercial and BBC radio and media, arts, community development, and academia.

Judging will run between August and September, and the 2021 awards ceremony is still being planned to go ahead, towards the end of the year.

The entire process is judge-led and we will run a number of rounds depending on submissions in each category until we have a shortlist which will go forward to the final ceremony to present the Gold, Silver and Bronze awards.

This year we have 19 categories, and judges are welcome to evaluate multiple rounds and categories if you feel able and are willing. Our judging platform should make the process easier and quicker, and we have a 5-element scoring system for each category for you to score the entry out of 10. This will hopefully make judging fairer, simpler for all involved, and hopefully, allow the true best examples of community radio in each category to rise to the top.

We will be asking you to consider the submissions on their own merits - we want judges to appreciate that community radio is a unique medium. We do not want the submissions to be compared to BBC or commercial content because of this distinctiveness.

Each category will have between 15 and 20 entries, and most entries are 5 minutes long with up to 600 words accompanying text. So for most categories we would hope it would only take a few hours to assess the section.

Where we have lots of entries, we will split them into groups and you may be asked to judge one or more groups (if you are willing), the highest from the groups will then go forward to the next round.

Again judges are welcome to judge multiple categories, more than one group in a category and multiple rounds.

Finally, we are asking that all judges consider the process as confidential, and to not discuss any submissions or the process outside of the panel or internal contacts. We will be asking judges to leave feedback for submissions and it will be up to them if they want their details released or not to the submitter.

Again I wish to thank you for your interest in judging the Community Radio Awards and thank you for the time that you are putting into the process.

Martin Steers
Chair - Community Radio Awards