Gold Quill Awards: Judging
Make a judge happy: Make your entry a winner!
by Sue Johnston, ABC, It's Understood Communication, Ontario, Canada
A judge opening a Gold Quill Award entry is filled with hope. Will there be a delightful display of strategic thinking, effective planning, good use of resources and creativity? Will the story be revealed in lively, uncluttered language? Will it be a winner?
Members of IABC Waterloosincerely hope so. Once again, we’ll be judging the Student Gold Quill Awards. With three universities and a college in our community, we’ve learned to expect the best from students. We were disappointed when not one 2009 entry met the standards for winning an award. Aiming to change that, we assembled a few tips to help you impress us. It worked. We were impressed - even dazzled - by some of the entries submitted by students.
Since our judges love to see great entries and happy award winners, we're providing those tips again.
- Use the resources at the IABC Student Gold Quill Award web site.
You’ll find much more than the entry form and rules. Examine a winning work plan. Read interviews with previous winners. Listen to a seminar about preparing your entry. Get a peek at the judges’ evaluation guides. It’s all there to show you how to make your entry a winner.
- Read the "Student Call for Entries"
This downloadable document tells you exactly what needs to appear in your entry. Pay close attention to the description of the work plan. Gold Quill Awards evaluate the thinking that goes into a communication project. The work plan is your chance to explain how you arrived at the solution you chose. No matter how impressive your work sample is, if your work plan doesn't show judges how you got there and why you made the decisions you did, it cannot be a winner.
- Select the right project.
Winning projects show your thinking, planning and problem-solving skills alongside your technical and writing abilities. Measurement is important, too. If your student project was not actually implemented, include an explanation of how you would have assessed your communication’s effectiveness. And please note that the audience is not your professor. “I received an A on the assignment,” is not the sort of measurable outcome the judges are looking for.
- Enter the right category.
If you’re unsure what category best fits your entry, please contact us. If your project is communication research or a communication strategy that doesn’t fit the other categories, you may include it in Communication Campaigns.
- Put time, care and three full pages into the work plan.
This is your chance to reveal your strategic thoughts and approaches to the problem. The work plan is the most important part of your entry. The Call for Entries (pages 8-9) explains how to structure it. You have just three pages to tell the story of your project, from concept to outcome. You’ll need all of them to adequately capture and convey the information that will earn a high score.
- Write the story clearly and cleanly.
As with any professional communication project, your judges are looking for clear, crisp, grammatically correct writing that makes it easy to find and understand the information you present. Proofread your entry carefully. Have a friend, professor, parent or other trusted adviser review it, too.
- Make your work easy to judge.
If you send audio, video or data on a CD, be sure it’s in a format easily read by most computers. If you want judges to go to a web link, be sure it’s working. Include passwords if we're going to need them. If you are entering the Writing category and your work sample is long, select and highlight a few pages that you want judges to read. As compelling as your prose may be, we can’t read dozens of pages.
- Send the right stuff to the right place
Apply and make payment online via the Gold Quill web site. The work plan and work sample come to Waterloo, Ontario, in Canada. Allow enough time for your entry to arrive by February 10, 2012. Make sure you've completed all the bits and pieces. Please don't put your work in a ring binder if a folder will do. (We're assessing your work, not the wrapping.)
Whether your project was a school assignment or done for a co-op, internship, or paid or volunteer job, you’ve invested time and energy to complete it. While it may look like more work, submitting your project for a Gold Quill Award is a way to squeeze extra value from all of that effort. Preparing the entry lets you—makes you—view your communication strategically, which is a critical skill for professional communicators. You also learn from the feedback provided on every entry. Best of all, if your work meets the standards to win, you’ll start your career as an international award-winning communicator. As judges, we’d love to see that happen.
Start preparing your Student Gold Quill Award entry today! The final deadline is 10 February 2012.
|
