Adobe MAX Social Responsibility Award: July 31 Deadline!

Adobe has recently announced the call for submissions for their annual Adobe MAX Awards. This awards program is truly global, with submissions coming from Adobe users around the world and across all spectrums of business, political, education, and social sectors.

This year, they've made one significant change that may be relevent to nonprofits and other social benefit organizations: a category for Social Responsibility that will highlight organizations working toward social or environmental causes.

So, all you nonprofits who sent in submissions for the Adobe-TechSoup Show Your Impact Design Contest earlier this year — here's another opportunity to show the world about the incredible work you're doing, aided by some cool software from Adobe. The deadline for submissions is July 31! Here are more details:

The annual Adobe MAX Awards is a global awards program that features the best uses of Adobe software for creating engaging experiences. MAX brings together business decision makers, designers, and developers to connect with each other, discover innovative uses of Adobe solutions, and become inspired. The MAX Awards provides a unique opportunity to gain valuable exposure for innovative projects.

This is the first year that Adobe MAX will host a Social Responsibility category that specifically highlights organizations dedicated to a social or environmental cause. On behalf of Adobe's Corporate Social Responsibility department, we want to invite all designers, developers and nonprofits committed to a social or environmental organization or cause to participate in the MAX Awards program!

This provides nonprofits with a unique opportunity to gain valuable exposure for innovative projects that brought success to their organizations. Receiving a MAX Award is a prestigious honor recognized throughout the technology industry.

All category submissions will be judged on the following:

· Quality of user experience
· Breadth of Adobe solutions used to develop application
· Quantified Business Impact of Application
· Category-Specific Judging Criterion (see below)

Visit the Judging page to learn about the judging process.

Social Responsibility: In this category, we are looking for applications that use Adobe products to enable change, provide solutions, and engage people around a social or environmental issue. Winning applications will include clearly defined social and technological problems and innovative uses of Adobe solutions to address these. Quantitative impact on the social issue is ideal, if applicable.

Category-Specific Judging Criterion: Clear problem and solution; why or how it is innovative; role software played; level of creativity and social impact(s). This might include number of people engaged and/or served around social issue, how lives have been positively impacted, or reduction in environmental footprint.

Please visit the 2009 MAX site to learn more about this year's program and view the 2008 winners and finalists.

How it works:

• Adobe MAX is a global awards program with winners announced at the MAX conference in Los
  Angeles. The conference will be from October 4-7, 2009.
• There are eight categories: Advertising and Branding; Education; Enterprise Productivity, Entertainment, Mobile, Public Sector, Social Networking, and Social Responsibility.
• Entries can be
  submitted on the MAX Web site.
  The competition closes July 31 at midnight Pacific.
• Winner selection:
  • Judging Councils, comprised of Adobe and Industry representatives, will determine the three finalists for each category from the pool of nominees
  • Category Winners will be decided by people’s choice voting of the three category finalists
  • Voting will open two weeks prior to MAX and close at 12:00 noon on Day 1, October 5, 2009

For further questions and inquiries, please contact Esther Ray, Adobe CSR Project Manager, at esray@adobe.com.

Check it out and get your submissions in by July 31. We'd love to see a TechSoup user win big!