How to Write an Award Entry: What Judges Really Want

If you’re wondering how to write an award entry, start with what judges need to see: a clear story, relevant evidence and answers to the questions they have actually asked.

A lot of businesses come to me because they want more leads, and that is usually the starting point of the conversation.

But leads do not just appear because you have decided you need more of them.

Before somebody becomes a lead, they normally need to find you, trust you, show some form of interest, be nurtured and eventually converted.

So, in very simple terms, the journey looks like this:

Found → Trusted → Captured → Nurtured → Converted

There are plenty of ways to help a business become found and trusted, including SEO, PR, LinkedIn, case studies, reviews, testimonials, founder visibility and a strong website.

One of the most overlooked, though, is awards.

Awards can help you become more visible because your business starts appearing on finalist lists, industry websites, social media and potentially in the press, but they also give you something that is much harder to manufacture yourself: third-party credibility.

Instead of you saying, “We’re really good at what we do,” somebody else is effectively saying it for you.

Yet one of the most common things I hear from businesses is:

“We probably wouldn’t win.”

“We don’t do anything particularly innovative.”

“I don’t think we’ve got a strong enough story.”

In my experience, that is rarely true.

I have written around 40 award entries over the years. Every one has been shortlisted and around 60% have gone on to win, and I have yet to come across a business where there is not a story worth telling.

Usually, the issue is not that the story is missing.

The issue is that the business is too close to it to recognise what is interesting.

So what are judges actually looking for?

1.  How to Write an Award Entry: Answer the Question They Asked

This sounds painfully obvious, but it is one of the biggest reasons award entries fall down.

Award writing is basically English comprehension.

You have a question in front of you, and your job is to understand exactly what is being asked and answer it properly.

If there are three parts to the question, answer all three.

If they are asking specifically about leadership, do not spend most of the answer telling them about turnover.

If they are asking about innovation, do not assume that a paragraph about how good your service is will somehow cover it.

Judges may be reading dozens, sometimes hundreds, of submissions. Do not make them work to find the answer.

Before you submit anything, go back through each question and ask yourself:

Have I actually answered what they asked me?

It sounds basic. It matters enormously.

2. Numbers matter

Judges want evidence.

Anyone can say:

“We have grown significantly.” How much?

“We improved productivity.” By how much?

“Our customers are extremely satisfied.”

How do you know?

This is where numbers become incredibly important.

If turnover has increased by 25%, say 25%. If a client has improved productivity by 15% because of something you implemented, put the 15% in. If your staff retention has improved, quantify it.

If you have reduced waste, cut delivery times, saved money, improved customer satisfaction or increased repeat business, give the judge something concrete.

Are you carrying out customer satisfaction surveys?

Are you using NPS scoring?

Do you know your referral rate, retention rate or repeat purchase rate?

Awards are stories, but the strongest stories have evidence behind them.

That does not mean every number has to be going in the right direction every single year either.

I once wrote an award entry for a company where profitability had dipped during the previous year. At first glance, that might sound like something you would want to hide.

But there was a perfectly good explanation. The business had made a substantial investment in systems and infrastructure because it was preparing for its next stage of growth.

So the story was not:

“Our profit fell.”

The story was:

“We deliberately reinvested in the business to build the capacity we needed for the future.”

Judges understand context.

What they want to see is that you understand your own business, your own numbers and the decisions behind them.

3. Show that you know where the business is going

Leadership, vision and strategy come up repeatedly in award criteria.

• What is your vision for the business?

• Where are you trying to take it?

• What is your purpose?

• Why does the business exist beyond simply making money?

Judges tend to respond well to businesses that can clearly articulate where they are going and why.

• If you have a vision, use it.

• If you do not have one, it is probably time to develop one.

• The same goes for strategy.

• What decisions have you taken to move the business forward?

• What have you invested in?

• What have you stopped doing?

• What are you building towards?

It helps a judge understand that growth is deliberate rather than accidental.

4. Innovation does not have to mean inventing something new

This is one of the areas where businesses tend to undersell themselves.

Mention innovation and people immediately think they need to have invented a new piece of technology, developed a patent or created something the world has never seen before.

You do not.

Most business processes have been done somewhere before, in one form or another.

The question is what you have done with them.

One client I worked with had created an internal training process.

The managing director came from a training background and, although she was running a renewables business, she was spending a lot of time developing her team.

She ran a more formal monthly training session, she had weekly get-togethers with the team, and the training covered not only their jobs but personal development and self-improvement as well.

Now, plenty of businesses train their people.

What made this different was that she formalised it.

She took something the business was already doing, gave it a proper process, made it repeatable, gave it a name and made it distinctive.

She called it The Gliding Frog.

That mattered because it made the process memorable, both internally and externally.

This is innovation too.

It does not always mean creating something completely new.

Sometimes it means taking something you already do informally, putting a structure around it, systemising it and making it recognisably yours.

The same principle applies when you borrow good practice from another sector.

Lean is a good example.

It came from manufacturing, but plenty of non-manufacturing businesses now use lean principles to improve workflows, reduce wasted time and create small, continuous improvements.

If you take a process from another industry, adapt it and improve the way your own business operates, that can absolutely be part of your innovation story.

5. Look at what you are doing for your people

Judges increasingly want to understand what sort of business you are to work for.

• How are you developing your team?

• What training do you provide?

• What mentoring happens?

• What progression opportunities exist?

• How are people involved in improving the business?

• A lot of businesses are already doing these things, but they have never formalised them.

You may say you do not have a mentoring programme, but perhaps your managers already sit down with people every month to discuss performance, development, challenges and future goals.

That is mentoring.

If it is working, document it. Explain how it works, how often it happens, what the objective is and what difference it has made.

6. Show what you are giving back

It is not all about turnover and profit.

More awards now want to understand the broader impact of the business.

• What are you doing in your local community?

• Do you support charities?

• Do staff volunteer?

• Do you offer apprenticeships?

• Do you mentor young people?

• What are you doing around sustainability?

Again, this does not need to be some enormous corporate ESG initiative.

It might be reducing waste, improving energy efficiency, changing suppliers, cutting unnecessary journeys, improving recycling or supporting local organisations.

If you are already doing these things, formalise them.

A simple CSR or sustainability policy can help you bring those activities together, and where it makes sense, you can align them with relevant UN Sustainable Development Goals.

That is useful for awards, but it is also increasingly useful for tenders and larger procurement exercises.

7. Do not only ask the management team

This is probably one of the most useful things I have learned from writing awards.

Some of the best stories in a business do not sit with senior management.

They sit with the people actually doing the work. I have been in plenty of meetings where the leadership team tells me:

“We haven’t really done anything particularly interesting this year.”

Then I speak to a team leader or somebody on the floor and suddenly I hear:

“We changed this process and one of our customers has improved productivity by 15%.”

Or: “We built a workaround because customers kept asking us for something we did not offer.”

Or: “We changed this system and it is saving ten hours a week.”

Those are the stories.

The people closest to the work often understand the day-to-day improvements and customer impact better than anyone else.

You just need to ask them.

The story is probably already there

Awards are not about reinventing your business to make it sound more impressive than it is.

They are about understanding what is already happening inside the business, putting structure around it and presenting it in a way that makes it easy for a judge to understand the value.

So before you decide that your business is not innovative enough, successful enough or interesting enough to enter an award, look again.

Ask yourself:

• Have we answered the question properly?

• Can we prove our claims with numbers?

• Do we have a clear vision and strategy?

• Where are we improving?

• What are we doing for our people?

• How are we contributing beyond the business?

• What impact are we creating for customers?

• Then speak to the people actually doing the work.

Because in my experience, most businesses already have an award-winning story somewhere inside them.

They just have not recognised it yet.

Clare Patterson is founder of Reason Why, helping SME leaders build marketing that actually works.