Gold Quill Awards: Judging
Winning Gold Quill Awards and Communicating Effectively: Why “ready, fire, aim” doesn’t work
by Jocelyn Canfield, ABC, Communication Results, Pennsylvania, USA
In March 2009, I had the experience of judging the final tier Gold Quill Award entries in San Francisco along with 35 other communicators from six continents. The experience of being with such a high-caliber judging group was quite a thrill. But the most critical thing I took away from the experience is the realization that everyone could win a Gold Quill Award if they understood what is required.
You don’t need to have a million dollar budget or a once-in-a-career mega-project to win a Gold Quill Award. You do need to have competent work with measurable objectives. Frankly, I expected to be wowed by the entries I saw when judging the final round. But most of the pieces I evaluated missed the mark in two simple areas: having clear objectives and demonstrating results that link to those objectives. Setting goals that link to organizational objectives is the hallmark of an effective communicator.
Writing your award entry—or carrying out your communication plan—shouldn’t be a “ready, fire, aim” proposition. It was obvious during the evaluation process that most entrants had not thought about measuring success at the time their program was conceived. Rather, they had a piece they were proud of and tried to rummage through their files for any sort of feedback or measures that would help make the case for their award. This is aiming after you've fired.
When you have a communication challenge, you need to generate specific intentions about the audience and your proposed solution, and you need to determine these before implementing your plan. You also need to determine what success will look like so that you can shape your work around it and measure it afterward. Measurement doesn’t have to be complicated, expensive or time consuming. It just needs to ask the right questions or show the right data to demonstrate the success of your effort.
Each objective should have a measure. If your goal is to increase participation in a program, your measurement should not focus on brochure readership. You might, however, try to uncover in a simple survey card if the brochure led to a change in behavior that led to increased participation in your program. If your goal was to increase revenues by 10 percent, the fact that 127 people asked for an extra copy of your beautiful calendar is irrelevant. You can measure that the calendar triggered potential customers to call, which led to closed sales and increased revenues. Thinking through the measures of your success before you execute your piece often gives sharper focus to your communication tools and tactics.
I seldom have clients who take the time to consider measurement of the success of the tools that I create for them…and I suspect that this is more the norm in our profession. I challenge you to consider what the measure of success would be for each article, for each brochure, for each direct mail piece that you create. Taking the time to aim before you fire will result in more targeted and therefore more effective communication…and perhaps win you a Gold Quill Award!
Start preparing your Gold Quill Award entry today! The early-bird deadline is 27 January 2010, and the final deadline is 3 February 2010.
|
