How to keep your awards program fresh year after year

Awards programs need to stay relevant, engaging and exciting as times change. Staying fresh ensures that your program is aligned with real-world advancements. It sustains community engagement and strengthens brand reputation.

But when you’ve established an awards program over the years, it can be challenging to balance consistency with innovation. Long-term participants can be resistant to change. It can be difficult to manage conflicting priorities and maintain identity.

Here’s a guide on how to keep your awards program sparkling year after year without compromising its essence.

1. Revisit your awards categories

Revisiting your awards categories is an effective way to keep your awards program relevant and engaging over time.

Updating the categories helps your program reflect current realities. This can ensure a more accurate measurement of excellence and enhance your program’s reputation for relevance. It can refresh your entrant pool by making the program more accommodating to new entrants who might not have fit into outdated categories.

This exercise can also keep your awards program competitive, driving entrants to think creatively and preventing past winners from dominating.

It’s helpful to assess all existing categories to identify whether they reflect your current priorities and socio-industrial changes. Consider checking for categories that are underperforming—repeatedly few or diminishing entries can be a sign that the category is outdated or has limited interest. Also, look out for overlapping or unnecessary categories.

Remove, merge, add or rename categories accordingly.

2. Refresh entrant and judging experiences

Entrants and judges are central to awards programs. Constantly streamlining their experiences helps preserve interest in your awards program for several reasons. It eliminates any hassle from the entry process and provides value to your judges.

It also showcases your program as dynamic and aligned with current best practices. Enhancing the entrant and judging experiences is key to improving accessibility, fairness, transparency and credibility in the awards program.

To give your judges an amazing experience, enhance their profile by spotlighting their expertise. It’s important to save their time and make their tasks easier by assigning only eligible entries and providing various judging modes. You can enhance the entrant experience by providing an easy-to-access entry portal, compliant registration, robust file compatibility and control and entrant support.

Leverage powerful awards management software, like Award Force, to easily breathe new life into entrant and judging experiences.

3. Strengthen the storytelling of your awards

Building a strong story arc around your awards program humanises it and ignites an emotional connection. This can fuel future participation and deepen audience engagement, driving meaning and authenticity in your awards.

Stories are naturally compatible with modern media formats. Sharing them across different channels, such as social media, podcasts and video-hosting platforms, keeps your program top-of-mind.

To effectively weave stories into your awards program:

• Spotlight the winners’ journeys, struggles and message
• Invest in multimedia to bring stories to life with visual storytelling
• Frame each awards cycle around a thematic storyline
• Combine stories with quantitative data
• Invite your audience and other stakeholders to share their perspectives on the winners’ stories
• Align stories with broader social narratives, helping your audience see the bigger picture

4. Boost community engagement around awards

Engaging your awards community in the off-season and on-season keeps your awards program relevant year after year by building continuous connection, participation and excitement. Keeping your audience, judges, participants and alumni involved makes them active partners. The authentic interaction creates a sense of belonging and emotional investment that ensures their renewed support every cycle.

To maximise engagement, keep community members informed using newsletters and encourage them to share program-related updates. It’s helpful to share the coverage and progress of awards-related activities and create community engagement programs.

5. Collect and implement feedback to improve awards process

Collecting and implementing feedback from all community members can drive continuous improvement and maintain your program’s relevance. It eliminates frustrating and outdated elements while ensuring the program stays aligned with modern realities.

Feedback forms, anonymous feedback channels, community polls, post-event surveys and social media listening are some creative ways to collect feedback. Pilot the new ideas and compare the results to previous years to gauge the effectiveness of the changes.

Keeping up with the times doesn’t imply a total overhaul of your awards program. Small updates and continuous improvement will help vitalise your awards program year after year while ensuring the program stays true to its original goals.