This month we’re celebrating a significant milestone at Rally Point: awards recognition by PRWeek and The American Business Awards (The Stevies) in several categories including corporate communications, financial communications and multicultural communications for clients in the crypto/digital assets industry and DEI. It’s a great feeling to be recognized for all of the hard work that goes into our campaigns, especially in fast-growing emerging businesses with considerable social impact. 

What went into the winning entries? This year, we selected Blackbird House (a coworking space for women of color and their allies) and CEX.IO (a global crypto exchange) given the unique set of challenges each faced. In both cases, we worked extensively with founders at each organization to build their storylines from foundation to an extensive integrated communications plan that included a number of elements including media coverage, awards and event planning. Check out the links below for details on the winning submissions. 

Before building our awards submission plan, we started with a framework for how to approach each award opportunity. Here are our recommendations for how to approach an awards submission:

Speak Directly to the Award Criteria

Begin by thoroughly understanding the award criteria (a no-brainer, I know – but it’s easy to brush over some of the finer points.) Also, make sure that you fully understand the organization behind the awards and highlight the strengths of your submission based on your understanding of the criteria and the sponsoring organization.

Highlight Your Strategic Thinking

A winning award submission shouldn’t be a laundry list of the tactics you enlisted to achieve your campaign goals. Instead, fully spell out the approach you took to identifying target audiences, building key messages and the process for deploying the strategy into the right channels. Wherever possible, highlight creativity and innovation. 

Tell. A. Story.

Even the best campaign results need some drama along the way. Your award submissions should have a classic narrative arc, with a beginning, middle and end that includes addressing challenges, being creative in the face of adversity and driving excellent results with real impact. When possible, incorporate anecdotes, testimonials, and real-life examples.

Show Measurable Impact

PR is difficult to quantify, which makes it even more important to highlight results as often as possible. Use concrete evidence such as media coverage, social media engagement, website traffic, lead generation, and customer feedback to back up your strategy. 

We’re immensely proud of the results our team delivered for our clients in our award-winning submissions this year. Have a comment or thoughts on how to improve an awards submission? As always, feel free to reach out and let’s have a conversation! 

Want to achieve similar results? We’re happy to offer a 20-minute PR prep session to help you get on the right track – https://calendly.com/jcrp.

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