May 2026

EDITOR'S NOTE

The month of May got it's name from the goddess Maia, who is depicted in both Greek and Roman mythology as the goddess of spring and renewal; the care taker of the earth.

After the tumultuous weather of March and April, May feels like a warm blanket come to offer comfort and promises good things to come.

May is the most exciting month. Students are graduating and commencing on a new life adventure. The promise of summer is just around the corner, and the earth is green and bursting with life!

May also means that most of you are DONE with your events! Woo hoo!

Here at zFairs, we also like the month of May. This is the time we really start nit picking over the software and getting it to be better.

We hope you all enjoyed your events this year and we are excited to see you all again, soon!

NEW & IMPROVED

This is what's NEW:

• Paperwork Review now shows count of how many projects there are.
• The number of times a project was scored is now able to be viewed in the judging results reviewer.
• Custom Questions can now have auto tags applied.
• Bulk Emailer now has EXCLUDE filters added.

New Configs:

• Entry: Self Nomination Limit per Entry limits the nomination to teams and not just per student

UPDATES:

• Participant e-signature requests now show the participants name, title and entry ID automatically in the request email. Copy of request email will also be sent to teachers and parents.
• Rounds now give a better summary of settings without having to click into the round.
• Awards can be assigned per round and can also be deleted per round, instead of assigning and deleting across all rounds.
• SRC/IRB and admin/staff can now add comments to students without having to reset the status.
• Staff users now have restrictions on what users they can delete, or change status of.
• NHD staff now has an Un-delete button when reviewing evals that have been deleted.

NEW LAST MONTH:

• Paperwork NAG email records
• Captains for special awards
• Manually input judge scores from Judging Results Reviewer
• NHD-lock assignments
• Group Store Items

TEAM NOTES

You may have seen me on YouTube, or met with me virtually. Now you can meet me in person!

Hi! I'm Anna Dewey and I will be at the International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix Arizona on May 9-11. I also am attending the SFDI Directors Gathering on May 10th. If you have any questions, want to offer some feedback or get an awesome zFairs pin, come find me!

We also wanted to announce that we have a referral bonus this year! Refer ANY event to the zFairs platform, and upon subscription, we will give both you and the new client a 10% off subscription or addon bonus. Referral bonus's can be stacked. That means if you have 10 referrals of ANY event sign up to use zFairs, you get your year's subscription for FREE!

Welcome, Lexie Veblungsnes

We are so excited to introduce to you our newest team member, Lexie Veblungsnes.

Lexie is on our development team and has been hard at work getting our app up and running. She also is a maniac at clearing our task board and getting new features and updates on all the zFairs sites.

We absolutely LOVE having Lexie on our team and want to officially welcome her to Illuminating Software.