Top tips for promoting best practices using awards 

If you’ve ever looked into organizing an awards program, you probably know that awards have multiple benefits — they can be a revenue source (through entrance fees and sponsorships), they boast incredible marketing power, and are a proven way to attract new clients, and business partners. The impact of awards, however, can spread well beyond these more or less direct benefits for your venture. With the right tools in place, you can use awards to promote best practices among your employees, business partners, and beyond. Take a look at how it works.

Nurturing best practices within your organization with employee recognition programs

Let’s start with your company’s inner circle, namely, your team before we move on to best practices promoted by business awards. Organizing an internal awards program boosts employee morale and nurtures processes and work standards within your team. It is a matter of psychology — employees are more likely to repeat a specific action if rewarded for it. Here are some examples of the things you can recognize and, by implication, promote: 

• Sales — rewarding employees based on the number of sales, generated revenue, or other performance-related criteria, is a great way to nurture best practices aligned with your business goals; 
• Customer service — another excellent choice for customer-oriented businesses to help implement customer satisfaction and retention practices; 
• Initiative, creativity, decision-making — awarding qualities that make your employees more effective can positively impact your bottom line. To that end, you can outline relevant criteria for choosing the employee of the year, month, etc.;
• Teamwork — making teamwork best practices a priority and rewarding them will improve communication and trust within your team. 

You can also implement an employee volunteering or giving program within your organization to improve the volunteer and social responsibility efforts among your team while boosting your brand image in the process.  

Awarding best practices beyond your company

In addition to being a source of revenue, generating publicity for your organization, and strengthening your brand image, awards are also one of the most efficient ways to promote best practices among your partners, clients, and the community as a whole. You can opt to reward certain practices or efforts implemented in organizations within your business network, such as: 

• Various sustainability practices — such as implementing a recycling program, eliminating paper use, using greener commute options, etc. 
• Use of renewable energy sources — investing in solar, wind power, etc. 
• Inclusivity initiatives — inclusive team-building activities, organizing international potlucks to celebrate diversity, etc. 

To promote best practices among your community or the society as a whole, you can: 

• Set up a separate competition — you can select specific best practices and create an awards program to draw attention to them; 
• Include categories in an existing program —  if you already run business awards and your usual program is paid (after all, awards are a great source of revenue), Evalato allows you to make specific categories free to encourage participation;
• Create a public-voting powerlist — you can also opt to recognize the people behind some extraordinary projects or best practices; 
• Set up an innovation challenge — you can promote best practices by organizing a contest, hackathon, etc., giving out prizes to the most outstanding solutions; 
• Run grant or CSR programs — setting up a grant program will help award and promote best practices further, granting funding to the most impactful initiatives among your business partners.

Note that recognizing best practices in your community will enhance the positive image of your awards, potentially expanding your network. 

Spreading the positive influence even further

Awards are a powerful marketing and PR tool and as such, can be used to promote best practices in a circle that spreads beyond your immediate circle of business partners. Let’s take a look at the ripple effect: 

• You showcase the winners — it starts with your organization and showcasing the winners and their achievements. Evalato has you covered with a specially dedicated webpage. You can also announce the results on social media, distribute marketing materials, etc., emphasizing best practices. 
• The winners publicize the award — then, the winners are also likely to spread the word about the award they have received through their own marketing and communication channels, further enhancing the impact. 
• Media outlets show interest — ideally, media outlets could also show interest in the awards and the achievements behind them, garnering even more attention and publicity.    

The positive buzz related to your awards that promote best practices (or any awards program, for that matter) will certainly attract new entrants to the next edition of your program, enlarging your immediate network and the impact of your awards.      

Growing your success with the right tools

What you choose to reward is up to you, both in the case of internal and external awards. In any case, however, you will need a reliable solution to organize the awards and magnify their impact. Here’s how Evalato has you covered: 

• Quick set-up with templates — while promoting best practices with awards is an important undertaking, it doesn’t mean it has to be time-consuming too. Evalato enables you to set up your program in under an hour, especially if you take advantage of our new preconfigured customizable templates which cover not only awards but also grants, competitions, hackathons, powerlists, etc.
• Multiple categories — you can choose to award as many categories as you wish, make them paid or free, or opt for a combination of both (for example, adding free best practices categories to a paid business awards program); 
• Showcasing winners — Evalato gives you the option to tag your winners and showcase their achievements on a ready-to-use webpage that will help generate positive buzz; 
• Cloning a program — setting up awards as a regular, rather than a one-time event will further motivate stakeholders (be it your employees or business partners) to apply the practices you have opted to reward to quality for the next edition. With Evalato, you can easily clone your program and get it going for the next edition with minimum tweaks. 

The bottom line    

In a nutshell, awards give you the power to nudge your team and your community that would benefit both your organization and society. As a bonus, they will improve your organization’s image and corporate culture. 

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