We recently hosted a webinar with Louise Parker from Propellernet and she shared some brilliant advice on crafting award entries that genuinely stand out. They were too good to keep in a webinar, so here’s the presentation that she ran through so you can catch her top tips:
Here’s a link to the custom GPT that she mentions and if you want to catch the original webinar you can watch it here: Tips and Tools to Write a Winning PR Award Entry With Louise Parker
Additional tips from judges
We’ve also been chatting to Steph Bridgeman, a regular at the judges’ table, who shared the following advice:
- Budget enough time to think about, write, review and finesse your submission. It can take around 4-5 days of investment when all the hours and various team members’ input is included.
- Do you have a good story to tell? Step back and think about whether your case study stands out from the crowd. Competition is often strong, are you able to tell a good story simply and clearly about why your work was excellent?
- Not all award winners reveal success. Particularly with awards focused on measurement, one of the key elements that judges will look for is whether the organisation acted on the data and insight and did something differently as a result. If something didn’t work well with a campaign, and the data helped you to course correct, this can also demonstrate best practice. Be humble and tell the story of your failures as well as your successes – you never know, this type of angle might be the thing which makes your award entry stick out from the crowd.
- Make it easy for the judges to award you the points. The awards portals generally give clear guidance on where points are awarded and how the judges will evaluate the various segments – keep referring back to this guidance as you craft your entry.
You can catch even more tips from Steph and in a recent webainar with her fellow AMEC judges here.
Using CoverageBook in award enteries
When using CoverageBook in award enteries, the Vault is your friend. Use the filters on the left-hand side to quickly find all the coverage you need for the right campaign and time frame. Here’s how.
You can include the top-level results in your main entry, and create a CoverageBook to share as supporting material—much neater than pasting in a list of links. You can even share an entire folder if that works better for your entry. And don’t forget: once a piece of coverage is added to CoverageBook, you can include it in as many books as you like—there’s no extra cost.
Good luck!
