Quickstart

This flow gets a new event organizer from zero to a runnable event.

Before you start: If you haven’t already, read Understanding Vote4Dance to understand the system and confirm you’re an event organizer.

Organizing your first competition? Planning your first competition lays out what is required of you as organizer, what must be entered in Vote4Dance, and when.

1. Create an event in Manager

Manager is the control panel for event organizers. Go there and create a new event.

How do you want to start?

The first question decides how much the wizard asks you:

  • Training competition with default settings — “Best for your first event.” No federation rules, and the questions you do not need yet are filled in for you.
  • Competition for a specific federation — “Use this if you already know which federation setup and classes you need.” You pick the federation, and its licenses, classes and rules apply.

Not sure? Take the training competition. Everything can be changed afterwards, and a practice event costs nothing and is excluded from federation reporting.

Event details

  • Event name — note that one event can contain several competitions
  • Competition organizer, Event duration (single or multiple days) and the date
  • Country, optional contact email, and a short description (max 150 characters)
  • Event mode — Practice event or Live competition. Live competition enables reusable competition profiles and billing
  • Location (with a Verify on Google Maps link) and Timezone
  • Billing information — live competitions only. Pick one of your recent customers, search for another by name, or fill in a New customer (club or company, or private person; name, email and country are prefilled from what you entered). Create saves both, and a live competition cannot be published without billing information. See Event setup

2. What you get with a new event

A new event is not empty. It comes with:

  • A floor called Main floor
  • One screen
  • Default cafe products
  • A schedule for the day with Doors open and Competition start

Classes, rounds, judges and teams are yours to add. On a practice event you can fill a round quickly with Generate random competitors on the Teams page — an action that exists only in practice mode.

3. Build your event structure

On top of what the new event already contains, create:

In the Manager Guide:

  1. Event setup: Verify competitions, floors, user access, schedule
  2. Competition setup: Define classes, rounds, teams, judges
  3. Registration and check-in setup: Enable registration periods, check-in windows

4. Dry run before event day

Run a full test with your team:

  1. Take one round to In progress with Start judging
  2. Have someone test the Judging app and enter sample scores — each judge sets their own PIN on their own device the first time
  3. Close, confirm, and publish results in Manager
  4. Verify that Screens, Speaker, and check-in work as expected

Then do it at the venue, with the projector and the real tablets: Test run and venue rehearsal.

5. Live operations sequence

For each round during the actual event, follow this lifecycle:

Round status What it means Button that moves it on
Not started Setup stage. Round settings are editable. Start judging
In progress Judges can mark. Close round
Closed No more judge input. You see results and placements. Confirm round
Confirmed Results reviewed and approved for presentation. Publish results online
Published Results are live: screens, public results, rankings. —

Previous status takes a round back a step. Note that the first two statuses read Not started and In progress in Manager — older material (and some of this documentation’s history) called them “Open” and “Ready”.

Repeat for each round.

6. After the event

From the Post-event and exports section, run:

  • Result exports
  • Ranking updates
  • Award generation
  • Data archival

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