The basis of APIRS is our fundamental belief that all award applicants deserve positive feedback from award programs (AP’s). The result was the APIRS program, which is an amalgamation of what we feel is the best of all of the various awards indexes.

APIRS offers various levels including a “Certified” level for those AP’s that do not wish to be ranked as well as a more traditional ranking system of 3 to 6. The APIRS Plus is for AP’s that have shown their ability to weather the storms of time and deserve special honour and recognition. Upon application to APIRS for membership, our team of evaluators will look at your award program and according to our criteria issue a Certification or Rating Level badge. This process will take approximately 6 weeks. Within 18 months of the initial application and annually thereafter, each AP will be re-assessed. If it is found that the AP has now qualified for a higher level, then a new ranking and badge will be emailed to the AP. Downgrades are possible but the applicant AP will be given the opportunity and reasonable time to correct any issues before a downgrade is applied, with the exception of disqualification criteria which is dealt with separately in the Disqualifiers Criteria.

As the managers of our own AP’s, we readily acknowledge that to provide this level of feedback requires some comprehensive and relatively expensive custom tools or a LOT of time, which understandably most of us do not have. We undertook to have these software tools created to assist any AP that recognised this need. We further acknowledge that AP’s are for the most part run for free and, as such, the cost of hosting the program comes out of the manager’s personal expenses and from their personal free time. Keeping all of that in mind, we have created the VSDA v3.0 software complete with a hosting package that we make available for a minimal monthly fee to any AP that meets our base criteria. Using the VSDA software and web hosting is not now nor will it ever be a requirement of being either Certified or Rated with APIRS.