Photo by: Jo Davies Photography
How to make your award entry impossible to ignore
An award win builds credibility, raises your profile and gives your team the kudos they deserve. It can also create valuable opportunities for PR, content, social media, as well as recruitment and sales.
But doing great work does not automatically lead to a great award entry. Judges can only assess the information in front of them, so your nomination needs to make the achievement clear, answer the criteria and provide evidence that sets you apart.
Here are some of the most important things to consider.
Choose the right award
Start by looking carefully at the available awards and categories.
Regional business awards can strengthen your profile in the communities where you operate. Sector-specific and trade awards offer recognition among customers, partners and industry peers. National honours, including The King’s Awards for Enterprise, can provide recognition on an entirely different scale.
Each will have different priorities. A local award may focus on regional employment and community impact, while a specialist industry award may place greater emphasis on technical innovation or sector expertise.
Do not enter a category simply because you can. Read the criteria and focus your time on the opportunities where your evidence is strongest.
Lead with facts and evidence
Words such as innovative, successful and leading appear in almost every award entry. Without evidence, they mean very little.
Strong nominations use specific results to demonstrate impact. These might include:
Context matters too. Explain where you started, what changed and why the result is significant.
Answer the question
Award entries often become a general history of the business rather than a direct answer to the judging criteria.
Break each question down and make sure every paragraph earns its place. When judges ask about a challenge, explain the problem before describing the solution. When they ask what makes a project innovative, spell it out rather than expecting them to reach that conclusion themselves.
Word counts are usually tight, so background information should only be included when it strengthens your case. Likewise, if you’re entering into an award category that does have a larger word count, don’t feel like you need to fill it. It’s better to have 500 words of clarity than 1,000 words of waffle, even if the wordcount allows for it.
Tell a clear story
The best entries combine evidence with a strong narrative:
This structure makes even a technical or complex project easier to understand and remember.
Tailor every entry
A previous nomination can be a useful starting point, but copying and pasting the same content into multiple awards rarely works.
TMPR has written nominations for clients including Promethean, Wild Creations, Restore Technology and Avantis Education, spanning regional business awards, specialist trade programmes and national honours. Recent client successes are featured in our May 2026 roundup.
For Avantis Education, this included an extensive application that helped the business secure a King’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation for ClassVR – the world’s first virtual reality solution for education.
The core achievement may remain the same, but the story and evidence should always be tailored to the judges and category.
Start early
Strong award entries require more than writing. You may need to gather financial results, speak to different teams, secure testimonials and obtain approval.
Starting early gives you time to find the strongest evidence rather than relying on whatever information is easiest to access before the deadline.
It also gives you time to plan how you will promote the result. A shortlist or win can support media relations, website content, email marketing and social media long after the awards ceremony.
At TMPR, we have a strong track record of developing successful nominations for clients, and offer award nomination support tailored for your business needs. We practise what we preach, too. Over the past year, TMPR has celebrated a Vale of Glamorgan Business Award win and two CIPR Cymru shortlists (with one Silver recognition in the latter), while TMPR Director Louise Morgan was shortlisted at the IoD Wales Director of the Year Awards.
Think your business deserves recognition? Get in touch to discuss your next award opportunity.
