Annual Awards Program: Winner Selection and Follow-Up Strategies

·May 28, 2025 10:42 PM·

Hi everyone! We are wrapping up our annual awards program and currently selecting winners from over 70 submissions—a great problem to have, but one I was not expecting! I'm now thinking through the post-award follow up strategy, including:

How to commemorate and honor everyone who submitted so they feel appreciated and encouraged to submit again next year
How to celebrate honorary mentions, because it's so hard to pick just one
How to publicly share all submissions, for those willing, to build community and knowledge sharing

If you have experience with awards programs, I would love to hear your insights. Thanks in advance!

💡4

8 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Shannon Howard
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For celebrating honorary mentions, I’ve done runners up or “top entries.” To commemorate and honor everyone, is it possible to send them all thank you cards that celebrate their success and achievement and thank them for participating! I am definitely pretty extra, but I’ve handwritten over 100 cards just to make things special. 🤷‍♀️ it’s small and simple but goes a long way! For sharing all the submissions, we followed up on our awards program to create case studies. Not sure if you’re planning something similar or what submissions look like. Maybe there’s a playbook? We talked about Mutiny’s customer playbooks on Friday’s call. Could be fun to say: “We learned so much from reading your submission. Would you mind if we share your use case as part of a collection of best practices?” That is very honoring, and has the double benefit of helping other customers!
Charlotte Kennett
·
·
Awards were the highlight of our year, and were an incredible engine for stories and advocacy; I LOVE THEM. A few things we did: For the winners:
Gave them a virtual badge they could add on their LinkedIn (we worked with our education team) - we encouraged including the extended team
Gave them a digital assets toolkit to help promote their story internally and externally, with a blog template, etc.
Encouraged the local teams to go and visit to celebrate, we'd help with some little things to make special. That's created some really great relationship moments. If possible we'd get them to deliver the trophy in person too.
With the content
We included terms around content re-use as part of the entry submissions, and asked them to potentially tailor or opt-out of said content re-use for purposes outside of the awards
We turned the winning stories into customer stories, that were then turned into an ebook, we then prioritised our pipeline based on our needs and quality of that story
We made all the entries available internally to be used by sales, solutions, CS and the wider marketing org (while being SUPER CLEAR on how this could be used)
1
Kristin Blye
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·
For runners up:
We still celebrated them and their success, turning their submissions into case studies and customer story slides for sales.
We sent them a small thank you gift (usually a credit to our swag store).
They will be included in our hand written holiday cards campaign at the end of the year.
❤️1
Madeline Coke
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·
I'd also love to see examples of how people have reused award submissions for content. Our problem is that our design team is so swamped, so this would be a project I'd take on. I'm no graphic designer lol, so would appreciate any quick ideas.
Lauren Locke-Paddon
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·
Lots of Vocal Video customers have collected "award acceptance speeches" with video and shared them in galleries ie https://www.naceweb.org/about-us/nace-awards/2024-nace-award-winners
💯2
💡2
Lauren Locke-Paddon
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·
These short videos can then be dripped out in social posts etc.
Julie Neumeister
·
·
Thank you everyone!! I am just seeing all of these fantastic ideas now (been busy wrapping up the program) and really appreciate all of the insights. Love the idea of writing handwritten notes for everyone Shannon Howard did you already have all their mailing addresses on file? Madeline Coke last year for the same program I put together this ebook in Canva and then hosted it on Issuu and linked out to it in email comms and this blog. The idea was also to host it on its own ebook landing page but that didn't end up happening. 🫠 this year we will be going bigger and better!
Shannon Howard
·
·
Julie Neumeister for the hundred cards, I was able to get those out in-person at a user conference. For the most recent awards program, we asked for mailing addresses for where to ship the award if they won and used that for gifts/cards.

Annual Awards Program: Winner Selection and Follow-Up Strategies | CMAweekly Customer Marketing and Advocacy Slack

Shannon Howard
·
·
For celebrating honorary mentions, I’ve done runners up or “top entries.” To commemorate and honor everyone, is it possible to send them all thank you cards that celebrate their success and achievement and thank them for participating! I am definitely pretty extra, but I’ve handwritten over 100 cards just to make things special. 🤷‍♀️ it’s small and simple but goes a long way! For sharing all the submissions, we followed up on our awards program to create case studies. Not sure if you’re planning something similar or what submissions look like. Maybe there’s a playbook? We talked about Mutiny’s customer playbooks on Friday’s call. Could be fun to say: “We learned so much from reading your submission. Would you mind if we share your use case as part of a collection of best practices?” That is very honoring, and has the double benefit of helping other customers!
Charlotte Kennett
·
·
Awards were the highlight of our year, and were an incredible engine for stories and advocacy; I LOVE THEM. A few things we did: For the winners:
Gave them a virtual badge they could add on their LinkedIn (we worked with our education team) - we encouraged including the extended team
Gave them a digital assets toolkit to help promote their story internally and externally, with a blog template, etc.
Encouraged the local teams to go and visit to celebrate, we'd help with some little things to make special. That's created some really great relationship moments. If possible we'd get them to deliver the trophy in person too.
With the content
We included terms around content re-use as part of the entry submissions, and asked them to potentially tailor or opt-out of said content re-use for purposes outside of the awards
We turned the winning stories into customer stories, that were then turned into an ebook, we then prioritised our pipeline based on our needs and quality of that story
We made all the entries available internally to be used by sales, solutions, CS and the wider marketing org (while being SUPER CLEAR on how this could be used)
1
Kristin Blye
·
·
For runners up:
We still celebrated them and their success, turning their submissions into case studies and customer story slides for sales.
We sent them a small thank you gift (usually a credit to our swag store).
They will be included in our hand written holiday cards campaign at the end of the year.
❤️1
Madeline Coke
·
·
I'd also love to see examples of how people have reused award submissions for content. Our problem is that our design team is so swamped, so this would be a project I'd take on. I'm no graphic designer lol, so would appreciate any quick ideas.
Lauren Locke-Paddon
·
·
Lots of Vocal Video customers have collected "award acceptance speeches" with video and shared them in galleries ie https://www.naceweb.org/about-us/nace-awards/2024-nace-award-winners
💯2
💡2
Lauren Locke-Paddon
·
·
These short videos can then be dripped out in social posts etc.
Julie Neumeister
·
·
Thank you everyone!! I am just seeing all of these fantastic ideas now (been busy wrapping up the program) and really appreciate all of the insights. Love the idea of writing handwritten notes for everyone Shannon Howard did you already have all their mailing addresses on file? Madeline Coke last year for the same program I put together this ebook in Canva and then hosted it on Issuu and linked out to it in email comms and this blog. The idea was also to host it on its own ebook landing page but that didn't end up happening. 🫠 this year we will be going bigger and better!
Shannon Howard
·
·
Julie Neumeister for the hundred cards, I was able to get those out in-person at a user conference. For the most recent awards program, we asked for mailing addresses for where to ship the award if they won and used that for gifts/cards.