Are your award ceremonies boring for everyone except the award winners? The members of the American Society of Association Executives recently used their discussion groups to share ideas on how to make award ceremonies more engaging for the winners and the audience. At Votenet, we’ve seen lots of award ceremonies end up too long, too boring and too much. Here are five quick ways to ensure your award ceremonies keep everyone entertained.

1. Choose the Master of Ceremonies carefully.
   Your MC should be engaging, comfortable in front of an audience and cognizant of the time.  If the board president is usually the MC but lacks the ability to engage the audience, perhaps use another person as the MC and let the board president hand the award to the recipient.
2. Create a tight script and stick to it.
   Write out the information you need to read about each award and winner, and then cut the text in half! Keep the stage time summaries to only the bare necessities, and put the rest of the details about the winners and the awards on your site and in press releases.
3. Make sure the potential winners are close to the stage and have easy access.
   When the winner’s name is called, he or she should have a clear path to the stage and shouldn’t have to come from the back of the banquet hall or wind through tight tables from the center of the room. Also, make sure the potential winners know who will take the stage if they win — you don’t want 5 people from one company scrambling from all areas of the room to get onstage — just ask 1-2 representatives from each group to accept the award.
4. Prep for the post-award photos.
   Instead of having the award winners pose onstage with the board chair for a photo while the audience waits, have a photo area offstage immediately after the ceremony. That way you can take more care with the backdrop and lighting, and you won’t have to slow down the ceremony for the photo opps.
5. Limit the winners’ speeches to a minute or less.
   If your winners are allowed to say a few words after they receive an award, give them strict guidelines on how long they have. A minute or less keeps the ceremony flowing nicely. You can always ask the winners to craft a statement for your website or the press release after the event.

What other ideas do you have to make your awards ceremonies more entertaining and inspirational for the audience?

The competitors in the Final Round of the 2011 March Mayhem were tense… who would take away the title of Best Resource for members of the Association of Corporate Counsel? Would it be the organization’s In-House Jobline that provided the best member benefit, or did ACC’s Annual Meeting rise to the top?

Echoing the NBA’s March Madness tournament playoffs, this spring ACC asked members to vote for their favorite resources and member benefits. Members could also fill out brackets that pitted 16 of the association’s member benefits against each other to see which resources garnered the most votes. Eight members with the best brackets won Aprizes such as gift certificates for ACC products, services and events — and the grand prize winner even received a basketball signed by the ACC staff.

All we can say is brilliant… simply brilliant. This case study is one of the best examples we’ve seen of ways to both engage members and showcase member benefits. ACC started the project in 2010, and members demanded its return in 2011. Because ACC released the results slowly over 10 days, they built up more and more excitement for the competition and engaged members over an extended period. In addition, the project engaged the staff at all levels and allowed the friendly competition to make everyone smile.

From an article about March Mayhem in Associations Now magazine:

ACC also created a video to promote the tournament, with staff playing the roles of various ACC resources and explaining their purpose. A cross-functional team worked on their own time to produce the video and make plans for the tournament. “When we did the videotaping, we kind of tried to do it all in one day, and the office was buzzing because people were really having a lot of fun with it. They couldn’t wait to get in and film their segment,” says [ACC Director of Membership Marketing Jim] Way. “And it just seemed like it was a big side benefit of the project that I didn’t anticipate, the actual enthusiasm and participation of our staff.”

It’s hard to top a voting March Mayhem tournament to determine the best association resources — but what other things have you heard about to engage members in an online voting event?

Perhaps you look upon your organization’s elections and awards as simply yearly tasks that you and your staff must perform. But these events are noteworthy both for your organization and the winners, and they provide an easy opportunity for you to increase your organization’s brand.

The key to leveraging these events for your organization is the press release. Press releases today are no longer solely an attempt to get your organization’s name in print from mainstream media. Creating press releases to distribute via the web will increase your organization’s online presence and can help drive more traffic to your site.

Many organizations already put out a standard release announcing the new board of directors or award winners, but an extra step can lead to a much higher distribution of the message. By creating press releases for each of the winners of elections, awards, scholarships and other voting events, you can give your winners the tools they need to spread the news in their own networks.

A simple way to create individual press releases is to use a mail merge program to insert each winner’s information into a standard template. Then you can send the individual press releases to the winners with suggestions on where they can distribute the information, such as their alma matter, corporate communications department, local newspaper, industry magazines and more. In addition, you can share information about places to post press releases for free (such as this list from SubHub). If you don’t have the time or staff to create individual press releases, create a template that the winners can personalize and distribute.

Does your organization put out press releases for your elections or awards? How do you use the events to increase your brand?

Does your organization offer industry awards to your members or constituents? According to a 2010 article on the Top 15 Association Trends, organizations are offering more awards than ever in an attempt to recognize industry leaders and create more connections with active members.

According to the article, “More than a few groups have developed recognition programs around competitions that engage members and sponsors and boost the impact of social responsibility initiatives.” For example,

The National Association of Letter Carriers organizes the largest one-day national food drive in the United States each May and tracks and honors chapters that gather the most donated food. And the American Bankers Association Foundation launched a successful contest in 2009 to reward one bank with $1,000 to donate to a local school if its employee volunteers educated the one millionth child participating in ABA’s annual Teach Children to Save campaign. The program has reached 3.4 million youth since 1997 with 80,000 bank volunteers teaching the importance of lifelong saving, but the contest has added extra zing.

What kind of contests and awards have you implemented, and how do you spread the news for nominations and entries? Do you use social media to promote your nomination process, or perhaps engage online voting into the contest to encourage member participation?