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Award-winning clients – I’m basking in their reflective glory

25/11/2013

Tips for entering Tech Awards

Last week, BJSS, a CommsCrowd client, won the TechWorld Award for Best Public Sector project. It’s a genuinely cool project, re-engineering a very big data warehouse, bringing it in house, fully automating it and helping the NHS to save on human resource and money – both scarce commodities in the public sector these days.

Award-winning clients - I'm basking in their reflective glory blog
if you had to guess which one of us was not an
award-winning software engineer, who would you pick?

The awards themselves were also impressive, in a transparently objective kind of way, projects were free to enter, award ceremony free to attend and they even gave an award to a company that couldn’t make it – in all my days I’ve never seen that before – fair play.

So I am very pleased for my client, it’s a huge validation of the great work they are doing and I’m pretty pleased for us too. I didn’t write the award-winning software but I did have a hand in writing the award-winning entry.

Here’s some tips for drafting those perfect 1,000 words:

  • Get buy in – you can’t do these on your own, work as close as you can with the client ping pong the entry back and forth until it’s perfect.
  • Allow enough time  – we think it takes about a day and a half on average to draft and edit a standard 1.000 word award entry and that’s assuming you already know the story.
  • Start early – it at least three weeks before – get information from source, ie the people that worked on the project.
  • Answer the question – every award has a bias so be sure to answer the questions exactly as asked.
  • Word count – keep it tight and don’t waffle.
  • Before and after stats demonstrating ROI – without these don’t bother to enter.
  • Have a heart – think of the poor judges and how many submission they have to read, do make an effort to tell a darn good yarn, keep the narrative sparkly and fluid.
If you found this interesting you might want to read a brief case study on our public sector campaign for BJSS

Post Script: other award winning entries include:

  • 15/04/2013 Caplin wins Best Web Implemntation at the Sell Side Technology Awards
  • 02/12/2013 BJSS wins Best Big Data Project at the Tech Success Awards.
  • 15/04/2014 Caplin wins Best Web Development Platform at the Sell Side Technology Awards.
  • 14/06/2014 BJSS wins Best Information Technology at the Best Business Awards
  • 14/07/2014 BJSS ranked fourth for International Growth in Sunday Times Tech Track 200
  • 15/07/2014 Caplin wins Best Trading Technology Vendor at the FX Week Awards
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