Building the winning award submission

Image: Patty Carroll - Trophy Wife

There's an enduring adage about accolades: "Winning awards means someone noticed the hard work when you weren't looking.”

We couldn’t agree more. It's important to appreciate people who achieve excellence, and it's meaningful to recognize the work that went into making something special. That's why Antonym developed a niche of expertise when it comes to nominating people or products for industry awards.

Building an awards submission can often be a last-minute afterthought, a sudden scramble for assets and notes cribbed from project summaries, Slack conversations, and long-unopened SOWs.

That's a mistake. The best judges take what you send seriously, and phoning it in is the equivalent of job hunters sending a generic cover letter and hitting Easy Apply. We take it seriously too, so when we gather information to craft a compelling nomination, we start with these essentials:

You gotta have a story. Personal narratives are the soul of a successful nomination. Why was something made? What motivated a person or a team? How did past experiences, including setbacks and challenges, set your story apart? The emotional arc of a nominee is what judges will remember.

Ask questions of your internal team. In addition to prompts on the submission form, we think of questions to unearth intriguing truths. What's something unexpected you've learned making something? What was the biggest challenge? What's your nominee's superpower? Is there a personal anecdote?

Add success metrics (but don't go overboard). Numbers stick in judges' heads, but a solid 2 or 3 will do just fine. Big victories get lost when you overload a submission with metrics.

Embrace brevity. Award applications often impose a character or word count in each section. But even if they didn't, more doesn't equal better. We rarely, if ever, max out the word count.

Stamp out cliches. Leadership, passion, innovation, creativity, disruption. We look for any opportunity to NOT use these perfectly fine words. Why? Because they've become familiar to the point of meaninglessness. We'd rather prove the meaning of those words via example and storytelling, using specific words to tell specific stories.

Repetition is a snooze. Overusing particular words, phrases, or themes feels like padding and invites readers to tune out. Once we effectively hit a point about a person or product, we move on.

Take time to choose the categories. We evaluate past winners to see where you stack up, and we're honest about how your story compares to the competition. This exercise sharpens the narrative and saves time (and submission fees) if the fit isn't right.

Is it awards season for your people or your products? Let's challenge the orchestra to play you off after winning.