Every year more and more organizations are using award programs to help them tap into the world of entrepreneurial innovation. Awards are a great way for companies to build their brand, establish thought leadership, ignite excitement within their organization, and gain exposure to new talent and ideas. Below are some tips on how to run the best awards program so that you gain value and meet your business goals.
Determine the Goals of Your Awards Program
What goals do you have for your awards program? Do you want to find innovative ideas? Do you want to reward excellence within your organization, clients, or business partners? Do you want to raise awareness of your business and its offerings? Do you need to generate additional revenues for your company?
Companies have varying goals for running an awards program. This can range from corporations who want to brand their company or who want to honor employee innovation. Some businesses honor their clients, or in the case of a media outlet, their readers for best use of their product or most creative idea, etc. Whatever the reason you have decided to run an awards program, make sure it meets your corporate goals.
Identify The Target Audience For the Award
Businesses need to determine who is the target audience for this award so that it will be marketed correctly. Is this technology award for engineers or a marketing award for CMOs? Make sure that the naming of the award and all the corresponding messaging uses the language of your target audience and correctly identifies them.
Getting the Word Out About Your Award
You can list your award challenge in an email newsletter and send it to your target audience. Don't have any email addresses? These can be purchased from various media outlets, associations, consulting agencies, list marketers and other places. Advertise the award competition on your social media outlets. You can create a contest page on Pinterest, tab or page on Facebook, even a video introduction on YouTube. Some businesses take out ads in publications, both online and in print. Write and issue a press release about your award competition and invite participants. Just be creative and diligent and the word about your award program will quickly reach the right audience.
After the award program, you will need to provide winners with a press release template announcing the award winners. Encourage winners to use social media to announce their win. Talk to bloggers and reporters who cover your industry and send them updates on winners.
Determine the Award Criteria
Consider the criteria for your award. Should you ask for work samples? Do you want to receive a full business plan? Will a short write up about how a software solution performs suffice over a detailed product plan? Think about the time commitment you must make in reading and sorting through all the required materials; then decide your criteria. Make sure the deliverables will distinctly help you select the winners.
Select Prize Packages
What prize would participants want to receive? Can it be a plaque or website logo? Does your prize need to have monetary value? Make sure you select a prize that will motivate people to want to enter. Often you can solicit vendors, sponsors, and business partners for prize donations. Make sure you have prizes in place before you send out a call for entries so you can include prize information in your marketing materials.
Be Clear About Details
Make sure contestants are clear about deadlines, what the important dates are, and what key deliverables are expected at each stage. If there are constraints around eligibility, make this clear right away so that you save time. Allow 4 weeks to recruit participants and 2-4 weeks for screening, judging, and computing.
Use Software to Facilitate the Awards Process
Use an awards management solution that automates the entire workflow process from call for participants through prize distribution. With a computerized solution, you will be able to get real-time information about your awards process. You can see how many submissions you have received, monitor judging progress and send nudge reminders, and automate email reminders to participants and judges. You can even solicit feedback from your team. This is particularly useful for competitions with multiple judging rounds and a large number of entries, and is a less labor-intensive way of keeping everything organized.
What Worked? What Didn't? Feedback and Analysis
Identify what worked with your awards program, and what didn't. Poll participants or send them a survey asking questions about your award process. Make sure you set up ways to track the impact of your outreach campaigns as they happen so you can adjust and put more effort into the most successful channels. Install Google Analytics on your website to track where visitors are coming from and how they are interacting with the content. Go a step further and set up conversion goals to see which sources are providing the highest number of sign ups. Use an email software program like Mailchimp to take the mystery out of your email communications with easy to understand reports illustrating open rates, click throughs, and website traffic generated.
Listen to the feedback, make improvements, and do it again! Happy Awarding!
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