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?

Many organizations think online voting is just for governance, but some organizations are using online voting to generate buzz in other departments.

A clever idea from the National Cooperative Business Association: they’ve created an online voting contest to ask attendees for their upcoming conference to vote on the speaker for the final breakout session at the NCBA Annual Meeting and Conference.

Speakers can nominate themselves via a written proposal or a video appeal, and they’ve opened the voting to anyone involved with cooperatives in the U.S. The winning speaker will receive complimentary full registration.

Has your organization used online voting as marketing for membership or events?

If you’re reading this, you’re spending too much time indoors this summer, says Coca-Cola. The company is taking its America Is Your Park competition to a new level with innovative options to vote for your favorite American park while you’re enjoying the summer sunshine.

Last year Coca-Cola ran an online voting contest to determine which U.S. parks were the most popular, awarding a $100,000 grant to Bear Head Lake State Park for the top title of America’s Favorite Park after they received 1.6 million online votes.

But this year Coca-Cola is taking the voting outdoors. Voters get one point for voting online, but if they use a smartphone or tablet to check in via Facebook at their park, they get 5 points. Five more points are awarded if voters upload pictures of themselves and their families at the park.

Associations could implement this strategy in their competitions as well. They could use social media check-in technology such as Facebook or foursquare to let voters at a conference choose the best new product from the expo hall or the best presentation in the education sessions.

What other ways can your organization implement more interactive online voting techniques?

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?

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?

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 →

In 2006, comedian Stephen Colbert energized his fans to vote to name a bridge in Hungary after him, and he received more than 17 million votes in a country that has only 10 million inhabitants (see video of Colbert getting the official word).

Colbert’s ability to profoundly influence the election led a Canadian reporter to ask, “Can you really run an online poll accurately?”

The answer is a resounding yes. Online polls can and should have mechanisms in place that can guard against fraud. The platforms should be able to limit the number of registrations per IP address and the number of times one can vote. In addition, a secure system will prevent automated voting scripts. Online voting events can also be third-party verified and highly secure, preventing voter fraud or administrative tampering.

Download Votenet’s whitepapers and resources about security here.