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?

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?

When an active association in the health care industry assigned an inhouse IT director to build an online voting system for their 2,000 members a decade ago, the members embraced the change. But in the next few years, the association doubled in size and the IT director moved on, and the staff discovered they lacked the time and knowledge to maintain the system.

Losing key staff to manage an inhouse online voting system is just one challenge organizations face when they try to use internal resources for their system. In fact, organizations often don’t realize the risk they’re taking when they don’t outsource the project.

Here’s our list of the top four reasons your organization should find a reliable online voting vendor for their elections and other voting events: Read the rest of this entry →

I’ve heard it said on multiple occasions that good old-fashioned hand counting is the safest way to ensure election integrity. In fact, many awards shows tout the fact that their votes are hand counted and verified by real humans.  The wisdom behind it stems from the belief that manual attention to the process by “real” people is the only way to ensure votes are properly verified and tallied. Electronic systems can, after all, experience glitches, programming errors or hack attacks by would-be election throwers.

And while that theory may sound reasonable,  if I had to make a choice based on years of running elections both ways, I would pick electronic voting any day of the week. I don’t disagree that technology can sometimes function less than perfectly, but human error happens exponentially more often and almost always requires one or more re-counts to ensure the results are truly accurate. Add on the hundreds of hours it takes to administer a hand-counted election, and hand counting becomes even less appealing. Read the rest of this entry →