The process of entering awards is like an athlete spending years training for a big named sporting event. They put in the hours, striving to beat their personal best, changing how they do things to be better and stronger and until they’re ready to put all that work to the test. It’s not showing off or bragging. It’s acknowledging growth, reflecting on what worked and then celebrating all that’s been achieved. Most people enter because they’ve been doing good work and want to be recognised for it. Awards are one element of a solid marketing strategy because social proof is still a strong market indicator for trust and credibility.

Yet, many don’t spend enough time understanding the process – a bit like putting together an Ikea bookcase and not follow the instructions or enter without the foggiest idea of how to frame their story in a way that presents their achievements in a way that builds a solid case.

The challenge is many awards do a terrible job of making the process transparent. Most don’t provide feedback as to why an entry didn’t win, have criteria that needs a translator and interpretive dance to figure out and aren’t open about what the judges are looking for.

What happens after you hit submit

Your entry lands in a system and sits in a pile with everyone else in your category. Judges get allocated entries and depending on the program, two or three or five judges will read yours. If it’s a well thought out award process, each entry is scored independently, against a rubric. The rubric is the criteria you were told about when you submitted (first red flag if none exist).

Good programs publish that criteria openly. You know exactly what’s being scored – impact, evidence, story and originality.

Judges read and then score each entry. Scores get aggregated and the entries with the highest averaged scores become finalists. In some programs, a second round narrows it further. In others, finalists get debated by a panel.

It’s a structured evaluation by humans, using defined criteria. Which is why two judges can read the same entry and score it differently. One values innovation. Another values financial results. The rubric keeps them honest but doesn’t turn them into robots. Anyone who tells you awards judging is purely objective has never judged one. Judges are people and are influenced by unconscious bias and past experiences – a good judging process removes a lot of that.

What judges can and cannot see

In any reputable program, the judge has no idea who wrote your entry. They don’t know if you wrote it yourself, paid a specialist, asked your sister-in-law or next-door neighbour, or drafted it on the back of a napkin at the pub. They see the entry. That’s it.

Some programs also anonymise the business name during first-round scoring. I like this because it removes a lot of subjectivity and bias.

Judges often don’t know who the other judges are either. Panels are built deliberately so scores don’t influence each other. No chatting or consensus-building until much later in the process.

How to tell a good program

Knowing which awards deserve your time is a skill you build because not all programs are created equal. Some are rigorous and properly run, while others are glorified networking events with a gala dinner dressed up as recognition. Your entry fee has to work hard, so the program needs to earn it.

Start with the criteria. A credible program publishes what judges are scoring against, in plain language you can understand. If it sits behind so much jargon you need a translator and an interpretive dance to figure it out, that’s a red flag. Rigour doesn’t hide behind fog.

Look at the judges. Are they named? Do you know what qualifies them to assess your work? A program that won’t tell you who’s reading your entry isn’t being transparent.

Check for a written conflict of interest policy. One with an recusal process baked in. Real programs have them because they take the job seriously.

Look for a complaint mechanism. Things do go wrong in any process involving humans. A program confident in its operation makes it easy to raise concerns. A program that brushes complaints aside is telling you how it handles problems when they come up.

Check whether the judging panels rotate. If the same five people have been making every decision for a decade, something’s gone stale. Industries evolve and so should judging.

There should be consistency in scoring, and they should have a scoring system, otherwise the results are being left up to the judge’s interpretation.

Transparency in awards

Awards require rigour and evidence to pick winners and the same should be applied to how judges are chosen, conflicts get disclosed, outcomes get explained and why some programs publish detailed criteria openly and others treat the whole thing like Roswell. Every year awards should be lifting their standards. In my experience, I see very few doing this. Many roll out the same questions and use the same vague criteria. Last year, one big award provider, change their criteria and buried it in the FAQs that if the finalist didn’t buy a ticket to the event, they couldn’t promote they were finalists. That stuck in my craw. Today, one said they would withdraw a client’s win because they weren’t going to buy their marketing package. Was any of this in the rules and criteria? No.

Check out Awards Trust Mark for what makes a good award.