zFairs
The student competition platform
Registration, entries and exhibit approval, judging, advancement, awards, tickets, and communication — for a single regional fair or a national program with fifty affiliates.
Visit zfairs.comEst. 2012 · West Valley City, Utah
We build software for organizations that run programs.
Illuminating Software is a small product company. We make zFairs for student competitions, Orkboo for document workflows and e-signatures, and ISEF Forms, free for science fair students and teachers.
500+
events a year
3
products
2012
established
What we make
Three products, one idea: the administrative work behind a program should not land on one exhausted coordinator with a spreadsheet.
Orkboo
Document workflows and e-signatures
Orkboo is everything in a workbook. Customizable forms, training, data collection, and signatures, for organizations whose processes still live in email attachments.
Learn about Orkboo
ISEF Forms
Free, for students and teachers
Science fair paperwork, explained and organized. Free to use, and free to keep using.
Open ISEF FormsWho runs on our software
Schools and districts, universities, museums, foundations, and national programs with affiliates in every state.
Our customers include national programs reaching hundreds of thousands of students a year. We name them only with their permission, and we are working on it.
Why organizations stay
We build for the whole job
Not the easy part of it. The registration form is the beginning. Approvals, judging, advancement, awards, and the reporting afterwards are where programs actually lose their evenings.
We configure to your rules
Every program has rules that came from somewhere and are not up for negotiation. We work to them. Custom configuration is normal here, not an enterprise upcharge.
A real person answers
We are a small company on purpose. When registration closes and something is wrong at nine at night, you reach someone who knows your event.
Student data, handled properly
We work with minors' data, payment data, and school records. That carries obligations, and we take them seriously enough to write them down.
FERPA, COPPA, and PCI obligations apply to this work. Here is how we handle them.
Tell us what you are trying to run
If you run a competition, a program, or a process that has outgrown its spreadsheet, we would like to hear about it. There is no sales sequence waiting on the other side of this — you will get a person.