When it comes to standing out in a sea of competitors, with the credibility and visibility you deserve, awards serve as potent markers of achievement and vital tools for building your personal brand and a solid business profile.
But not all awards are created equal.
Since the original business awards were created by The Stevie Awards (The name Stephen means “to be crowned") back in the early 2000s, there has been a tsunami of award programs developed and launched. Some have stood the test of time, others have opened for one year only, and others have faded away. We've had the unique vantage point of observing the growth of the awards industry, both as an entrant, a judge and as professional awards writers helping countless others to achieve recognition.
So, how do you choose the best awards to go for?
If you are considering entering awards, we highly recommend that, before you dive in and submit your nomination, you first scrutinise the integrity of the awards themselves, ensuring they resonate with you and your core values.
It’s vital, if you want to leverage the value of awards, that you understand their underlying structure and make informed decisions about where to invest your time and effort. Each award program, and there are hundreds of them, has its own unique characteristics, and many are indeed business models themselves.
This is more than a question about paying to enter or being able to self-nominate, which are vital elements to discuss; this is a question of integrity within the awards program structure and purpose itself, the way they operate, how they are judged and the overarching reason why they exist in the first place.
Here are the different types of awards programs for you to consider:
Business Model Awards - Community or Credibility?
Many organisations offer awards intrinsically linked to their business model, often intertwined with mentoring programmes, coaching services, or supportive communities. While participation in such awards can be incredibly valuable for individuals deeply aligned with and active within these specific communities, a crucial consideration arises: are the winners truly chosen based on merit alone, or does membership and active participation within the organisation play a significant, perhaps even decisive, role?
For example, judges have told us that a different entrant won on the night compared to how they had been judged, and the winners were those who were paying members of the community.
These types of awards present a fantastic opportunity for recognition within a familiar ecosystem, but if you want independent validation and you don't want to be part of the awards community, it's a factor to weigh carefully.
Association Awards: Honouring Peers, or Unseen Influences?
Professional associations or industries frequently host their own awards, celebrating excellence within their specific industries. The judging panels for these prestigious accolades are often composed of long-standing or lifetime members of the association – individuals with deep-seated knowledge and experience in the field. While this expertise is invaluable, it can also inadvertently encourage unconscious bias. The very familiarity and pre-existing relationships within the association, coupled with a potential lack of independent oversight, can influence outcomes.
We once had to pull up another judge who brought information to the review panel that wasn’t in the entrant's submission, and had to ask them to recuse themselves from the final decision because their judgement was clouded, based on their intimate knowledge of the entrant, not on the submission we were voting on.
Navigating these awards requires not just showcasing your achievement, but also being acutely aware of the internal dynamics that might be at play behind the scenes.
Pay-to-Play Awards: Winning on Merit or Credit?
These are programmes where, frankly, winning isn't about merit or a meticulously crafted submission, but rather about an exchange of funds. You might receive an unexpected email congratulating you on an alleged win, swiftly followed by a demand for a substantial fee – sometimes thousands of dollars – to receive your trophy or certificate.
Our unequivocal advice?
Avoid these at all costs. Such 'accolades' inherently lack integrity. Not only is their legitimacy questioned by those in the know, but their leveraging power is virtually non-existent. How can you genuinely showcase an award you merely bought, without having undergone a rigorous nomination or judging process?
True credibility comes from earned recognition, not a financial transaction. When considering an award, always ask: was there a genuine submission process? Was there independent judging? If the answer is no, then it's highly likely to be a pay-to-play scheme, and a significant detour from building authentic credibility. And, if you have paid for one of these awards, please don't share it like it’s some sort of honour. It’s a vanity metric, so pop the logo on your website, brochure or email footer, but that’s about all it’s good for.
Free vs Fee Awards: What is the real cost?
A common misconception is the belief that awards charging an entry fee are somehow less authentic. This simply isn't the case. The integrity of an award programme lies not in whether it charges a fee, but in the rigour of its process. While some excellent awards are indeed free to enter, many reputable programmes do have associated costs.
Consider the Telstra Best of Business Awards, a highly sought-after national accolade in Australia. While there is no entry fee, the deeper you progress, the more significant the time investment becomes. The first stage regularly attracts over 60,000 entrants, but by stage two, when a demanding 1,500-word essay is required, over 50% of applicants drop off. Similarly, the globally recognised Stevie Awards offer numerous free categories across their programmes, alongside categories with a fee that include your trophy or medal, acknowledging the significant administrative effort involved in judging thousands of submissions.
The key takeaway here is that whether an award is free or fee-based, a genuine pursuit of recognition demands considerable effort. Be prepared to invest time and resources in crafting a compelling entry. Beyond the entry fee itself, remember that attending gala dinners, travel, accommodation, and even professional photography or video that some awards charge for, are all extra costs.
A credible award, regardless of its entry fee structure, always values the quality of your submission and the integrity of its judging. As professional award writers, we consistently advise clients that the value derived from a legitimate award far outweighs the investment in time or a reasonable fee.
The Pitfalls of Popularity Contests: Votes vs. Validation
These often cause the most frustration and offer the least tangible return. These awards heavily rely on public voting, often leading to a race for who can rally the largest network or, more unfortunately, who can exploit the hacks or shortcuts to generate multiple votes.
Our advice is to avoid these programmes unless the public vote is supplementary, like a ‘People's Choice' element to a more comprehensive, judged awards process. Solely relying on a vote-based system fundamentally undermines the integrity of true recognition. You risk buying an award through sheer volume of votes, rather than earning it through demonstrated excellence. This approach provides little to no legitimate leveraging power, as the industry understands that such wins often lack true substance. Focus your efforts on awards where genuine achievement and impact are the primary criteria, expertly articulated by skilled award writing.
Effectiveness Awards: The Preferred Pathway to Proven Impact
Our absolute favourite category, and one that truly aligns with genuine recognition, these programmes cut through the fluff and demand concrete evidence of your results and impact. While it’s a myth that you need to demonstrate financial or growth data for every award (up to 90% of awards don't ask for this), effectiveness always puts your actual achievements front and centre.
A prime example is the Australian Achiever Award, which centres entirely on customer service. To assess this, they directly contact up to four of your nominated clients, interviewing them and ranking their responses to specific questions about your service. This level of external validation, requiring verifiable evidence of your accomplishments and the actual quality of your service, makes winning such an award incredibly valuable and highly credible.
Similarly, the rigorous process for nominating someone for an Order of Australia (OAM) involves a detailed online form outlining the nominee's exceptional service or achievement with specific examples, alongside contact information for up to four referees who can corroborate the claims. This emphasis on tangible results and third-party verification is what elevates an award from a mere accolade to a powerful testament of true impact.
So your entry is in, now it’s time for judging to begin.
So now you're more savvy about which awards to align yourself with, it’s time to lift the lid on the judging process and some of the issues you may never realise go on behind closed doors. As an award entrant, knowing the process is part of ensuring you put your best submission forward. If you are running an awards program yourself, you might want to take note of these to help build integrity in your awards judging process.
Awards Without Judging Criteria
Perhaps the most perplexing type of judging comprises awards that lack any clearly established judging criteria. One woman in leadership who was asked to judge an international award was told there were no criteria and that she could just “figure it out”. She asked my advice, and I’m pleased to say she had already decided to contact the other judges to set criteria.
In such loose scenarios, the awards evaluation process can become entirely subjective, leaving ample room for personal biases and arbitrary opinions to dictate outcomes. The result can be unexpected winners, or a general sense of opaqueness that undermines the award's perceived value. Judges need a clearly defined system for establishing a submission ranking. This might include a numbered system, with average ranking, multiple choice questions or even asking for judges' specific written feedback. Even the most simple of guidelines, such as ranking from 1 worst to 10 best based on 3 values of how well the question was answered, the achievements noted and the results or impacts, transcend subjective interpretation, even in the absence of explicit guidelines.
Unconscious Bias - The Silent Saboteur
Unconscious bias is a subtle yet powerful force that can derail the integrity of an awards program incredibly quickly, and no one even knows it happened until it’s too late. Unconscious bias refers to the ingrained attitudes, stereotypes, or beliefs that influence an individual's judgment without their conscious awareness. In the context of awards, this can manifest in several ways:
The presence of unconscious bias underscores the need for robust and ethical award processes and for having a certain number of independent judges in your panel. Having an awards organiser or teams of judges working together can also help to minimise bias, as they will have robust discussions from multiple angles, not just one person's opinion.
And let’s quickly discuss conscious bias, possibly the most distasteful aspect of poorly managed awards judging. As mentioned before, this often happens when an awards program is part of a community or wider business model, where the judges will lean towards those in the community or paid-up members of a broader offering. You can tell when this happens because the majority of the winners on the podium will be those participating in the program and their testimonials will be all over the program's website or on the awards organisers' LinkedIn profile.
Steps Towards Fairer Awards
In our mind, there is a real argument here for AI judges. They are detached from the industry or sector, can be fully trained to judge based on the category requirements and entrants merits, if provided with accurate guidelines AI will use systems and processes to judge, it can’t be paid off or bought and has zero bias because they have one job alone to do - judge the content in front of them.
Until this happens, here are some tips to help minimise the impact of unconscious bias and uphold the integrity of awards for organisers and judging bodies. These steps not only facilitate fairness but also enhance the overall prestige and credibility of the awards themselves.
Should you be a judge?
Being an awards judge is an incredible honour and comes with a high level of responsibility, but is definitely worth it. You get to look under the hood of businesses and leaders to discover their innovative ideas, approaches, challenges and successes. You learn a huge amount about the business or sector and it’s absolutely vital that you go into the process with no preconceived ideas and leave the process with your own personal integrity intact. Akin to being on a jury, you should never disclose what you know about those you’ve judged. After the event you should not share any insider information and you should also be aware of your own biases, and be prepared to step back from any emotional viewpoint while you are judging.
Based on the outline about bias you now understand that to be a judge you don’t need to know the industry, in fact, sometimes it's better that you don’t, so you can independently judge entries on their merits alone.Many awards call for judges throughout the year, so get in touch with them, apply to be a judge and be prepared to dedicate your time - judging certainly gives you a unique experience and adds credibility to your standing as well, but there is effort involved.
Of course, this entire topic of awards integrity is close to our hearts. As professional award writers, we rely heavily on clear criteria to meticulously tailor entries that directly address what judges are looking for, and it’s incredibly frustrating to submit a well-prepared entry that doesn’t achieve an award, beaten by those who have achieved less but are more popular or part of the ‘in-crowd'.
So let’s, for a moment, forget about us and talk about you, the business owner, entrepreneur, professional service provider, innovator or thought leader who is considering entering and leveraging awards and what you can do to ensure you do it with integrity.
When embarking on the journey of being involved with awards as an entrant or a judge, it is crucial to consider several factors to maximise the value they bring to your professional growth.
Ultimately, by prioritising awards that uphold strong integrity, you ensure that your accomplishments are recognised fairly and genuinely. This approach elevates not just your personal and business profile but also contributes to a more equitable and trustworthy awards landscape.
At The Audacious Agency, our team of expert Award Writers and Professional Award Writers are adept at navigating the nuances of various award programmes. We meticulously craft compelling narratives, backed by concrete evidence and aligned with specific judging criteria, to ensure your story stands out. Our deep understanding of what constitutes a winning entry, coupled with our experience as judges and award representatives plus our commitment to awards integrity, helps clients achieve significant recognition and leverage their success effectively.
We believe that true success in awards comes from a strategic, informed approach and a partnership with experienced award writing specialists. We can develop a profile-building plan personalised for you and your reputation, with a calendar of awards that suit you perfectly and have passed the integrity test, plus a 12-month content plan to leverage the awards regardless of the outcome.
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For a deeper dive into how The Audacious Agency can help you navigate the awards landscape and ensure your integrity shines, book a chat with us today.
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