4 Tips for Assembling a Circle of Excellence Awards Entry
So you and your team have achieved something big within your institution. Now you want to shout about it—and rightly so! The CASE Circle of Excellence Awards await—but how do you ensure your entries make the coveted awards shortlist, and give your institution the best chance of proudly accepting a Grand Gold, gold, silver, or bronze award?
The Circle of Excellence Awards showcase outstanding work in advancement services, alumni relations, communications, fundraising, and marketing. The awards are open to professionals working at member colleges, universities, independent schools and their affiliated nonprofits around the world.
Entering the Circle of Excellence Awards can seem like an overwhelming task. How do we pick the best (and most relevant) story to tell about our institution? How do we make sure to tell our institution’s story in a way that captures the judges’ attention, and gives us that all-important edge? It’s enough to make us procrastinate taking the first step to enter the awards.
But it needn’t be this way. Let’s walk through it together.
I’m no expert on—nor winner of—CASE Circle of Excellence Awards, but I’ve entered the awards for the last three years since I’ve been a managing editor in the marketing and communications department at Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business. Each year, I learn something new. Allow me to share my lessons.
1. Pick the right category.
Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” Never has this quote been more appropriate than when entering CASE Circle of Excellence Awards. In 2019, CASE received more than 2,800 entries for consideration in 100 categories by 611 members of higher education institutions, independent schools, and nonprofits from around the world. While a win is never guaranteed, especially with the competition, we’ll give ourselves the best chance for success if we carefully consider and select the category for our entry—not to mention our overall methodology and strategy.
Even though many entries meet criteria for more than one category, and we can enter as many categories as we wish, time is money and money is time. One year when I entered the CASE awards, the marketing budget for such things was limited. So it was important to pick the best category—the one in which I believed the project had the best chance to win—for each of the few projects I could enter. Another year, I had a bigger budget. So I took more risks, entering a few standout projects into more than one category and award area.
This is the part where looking at past CASE winners can guide us.
2. Tap your team.
The first year I entered the Circle of Excellence awards, I was alone at my desk reviewing the award areas and trying to connect them to projects we’d done over the past year. I needed help.
Once I pulled in the senior art director and director of content who’d seen all of the design and copy work that flowed through our team, they suggested a few standout projects. With those standout projects, we looked at the categories together, chose the best categories and award areas for each project, and I was off to manage the rest, which included gathering the coworkers who worked on the projects so they could contribute to the entries.
3. Take the time you need.
In my experience, a decent award entry can take time and thought to put together with all hands on deck. This allows enough time for writing the summary and methodology and strategy, finding and tallying up invoices for external vendors and consultants, detailing how our resources were used, describing the outcomes, and gathering the materials (e.g., hyperlinks and attachments).
It may sound obvious, but we also need to give a substantial buffer between when coworkers finish their part of the entry and send it to us to finalize and submit, particularly if anyone is late. One year, I was entering the information hours before the deadline when technical difficulties cropped up. I ended up emailing awards@case.org and was able to get help to submit my entry, but the stress and rush of it all left me wondering about my entries. Did I miss a field? Could I have pasted the wrong data into a field? Could we have won if…?
I’m looking forward to using CASE’s new online portal to submit our nominations. It will be nice to start the entries in one session and go back to them again and again until we’re done. Front-loading the process will ensure we do our projects justice.
4. Tell your story.
Often, the projects we want to nominate for the CASE awards are the ones that are months removed from the entry deadline. How we accomplished our goal(s) is not top of mind any longer. The key activities, strategies, and/or decisions that were central to our success (such as research, collaborations, design considerations, message/content development, communication or marketing strategies, resource deployment, constituent engagement) are buried out of sight in our project management system. That’s why I remind my coworkers to always be on the look-out for award-worthy examples while we’re working on projects or as we’re wrapping them up. (Sorry. This lesson won’t benefit us until next year.)
While it’s hard to think about award entries in the thick of a project, that’s precisely when we understand the challenge we’re aiming to improve or the goal we’re striving to meet. We’ve just come from a meeting with the project stakeholders who painstakingly explained the issue. We can simply cut and paste our notes into the prospective award draft.
As we’re wrapping up a project, we have a complete award entry except perhaps the outcome data. Now we need to make sure we can tell the story simply so the judges will instantly grasp the project. If they’re not from our industry, we’re got to explain any context that makes our story important. And we can’t forget to prove it or share how we’ll prove the project was a success.
“My favorite pet “don’t” for submission is don’t write too much for the abstracts,” says Dalene Abner who’s served nearly continuously as a judge since 1996. “Use bullet points to highlight two or three of the most important notes or results. Once you read an abstract, they all start sounding alike, so study the criteria and then put in real facts or statistics that indicate how well this entry succeeded in reaching them.”
Lastly, spelling and grammar matter. That’s why CASE advises us to prepare a draft entry in Word or Google Docs before we upload it to its online system. And it doesn’t hurt to have a coworker who hasn’t helped write the award entries proofread them. This makes the online entry process easy since we’re cutting and pasting from spell-checked, proofread entries.
Good luck on the CASE Circle of Excellence Awards!