Awards submission writing
Good work loses to better entries.
Annie Tokatlian writes award entries for organisations whose results are stronger than their paperwork. Chartered Marketer, fifteen years running brand and growth for membership and cultural organisations, and the person who turns a messy project folder into an entry a judge can score.
MCIM
Chartered Marketer
15+
years in brand, communications and growth
£1.89M
new revenue delivered in a single year
15%
cut in churn
The honest bit
Judges score the entry, not the work.
A judging panel sees a stack of entries, a scoring sheet and an afternoon. They never see your project. They see what you wrote about it, and they score that against the criteria in front of them.
Most entries lose for four reasons, and none of them is the quality of the work.
- They describe activity, not outcome. Twelve paragraphs on what was done, one line on what changed. Judges score the line.
- They answer the wrong question. Every criterion carries a weighting. An entry that spends its word count on the 10% criterion and rushes the 40% one loses to a duller entry that got the balance right.
- The evidence is missing or unusable. A number without a baseline, a quote without a name, a chart nobody can read at A4. Judges are told to score what is in front of them, and they do.
- They were written by the person closest to the work. That person leaves out the impressive part because, to them, it was a Tuesday. It takes an outsider with a marketer’s instincts to spot what the panel will care about.
Fixing those four things is a craft. It is the same craft as writing a proposition, a funding bid or a board paper: work out what the reader is scoring, gather proof, and write to the proof. It is what Annie has done for a living for fifteen years.
How it works
Four steps, one draft you mark up, and a deadline you stop thinking about.
Most entries take two to three weeks from first call to submission. Tighter is possible if the evidence already exists.
01
Choose
Which awards and which categories are worth the entry fee and your time, and which are not. If the answer is none this year, Annie says so.
02
Gather
One structured call with the people who did the work, and a shared folder. Annie pulls out the numbers, the baseline, the quotes and the story, and tells you what is still missing.
03
Write
A full draft mapped to the criteria, their weightings and the word limits, written in your organisation’s voice. You mark it up once. Annie revises it once.
04
Submit
The final entry formatted for the portal or the PDF, supporting material checked, and a submission confirmed before the deadline, not on it.
What you get
Three ways to work with Annie.
Fees are fixed per entry and agreed in writing before any work starts. Ask and you get a number, not a discovery call.
One award, one category
Single entry
You know which award. You need it written properly.
- Criteria and weighting mapped before a word is written
- One evidence-gathering call and a checklist of what is missing
- Full draft to the word limits, one round of your amendments
- Final entry formatted for the portal, with supporting material listed
A year of entries, planned
Awards programme
For organisations that want awards to be a decision, not a scramble every time a deadline appears in someone’s inbox.
- A shortlist of the awards and categories worth your money this year, with dates
- An evidence bank built once and reused, so each entry gets quicker and cheaper
- Every entry written, checked and submitted through the year
- Judges’ feedback read and fed into the next one
Already written, needs a second pair of eyes
Entry review
You have a draft. You want to know how a judge would score it before you find out the hard way.
- Your draft scored against the published criteria, criterion by criterion
- A marked-up copy showing what to cut, what to move and what to prove
- A short call to talk it through
- Turned round in five working days
Also available: preparation for the judging interview or presentation stage, and help designing the scoring and entry process if you run an awards scheme of your own. Ask.
Is it worth entering?
Sometimes the honest answer is not this year.
An entry cannot manufacture a result that is not there. Annie will tell you which side of this line you are on before you spend anything, and it costs you one phone call.
Enter when
- Something measurably changed and you can show the before as well as the after
- The people who did the work can spare two hours to talk about it
- Winning, or being shortlisted, would be used: in a tender, a membership renewal, a recruitment ad, a board paper
- The category actually fits. A stretched category loses to a natural one every time
Wait when
- The results are not in yet. Enter next year with the numbers, not this year with the plan
- Nobody can say what the baseline was. That is fixable, but it is a measurement job first and a writing job second
- The award is pay-to-win. Some are. Annie will tell you which, and you will not see them on her shortlist
- The deadline is in three days and the evidence is in six people’s heads
About Annie
Annie Tokatlian
MCIM, Chartered Marketer · Partner, Ampus
London, working with organisations across the UK.
A marketer who has sat on your side of the table.
Annie is a Chartered Marketer with more than fifteen years leading brand, communications and growth for high-profile membership and cultural organisations. She has spent her career running the kind of marketing programmes that get entered for awards, which is a different thing from having only written about them.
In a single year she delivered £1.89M of new revenue, and she has cut churn by 15%. She ran all marketing for Oskar, the private members’ network where agents share property above £2m, from focus groups with agents through to the HubSpot implementation the commercial operation runs on. She now runs marketing for Diligence Hub, a B2B SaaS compliance platform for recruiters, umbrella companies and end clients.
Award entries use the same discipline as all of that: understand what the reader is judging, find the proof, and write to the proof. She is the other half of Ampus, the partner-led consultancy at ampus.co.uk, so if the conversation turns out to be about the marketing rather than the entry, that is covered too.
Questions
The things people ask before they get in touch.
Anything else, ask. A reply within a working day.
Do you guarantee a win?
No, and nobody honest does. Judging panels are made of people, and people disagree. What Annie can promise is that the entry will answer every criterion with evidence, in the weighting the judges use, and that it will read as though a senior person wrote it. That is the part of the outcome you control.
Which awards are worth entering?
The ones your buyers, members or funders have heard of, where the category fits naturally and the judging is independent. In most sectors that is a short list, and it is shorter than the list of awards that will email you. Annie will tell you which are on it for your organisation, including the ones she would not enter.
How long does an entry take?
Two to three weeks from first call to submission is comfortable. A week is possible if the evidence already exists and the people involved are available. Three days is possible and not recommended, because the entry will be thinner than the work deserves.
What do you need from us?
Two hours of the right people’s time, access to the numbers, and a decision-maker who will sign off the draft. The rest is Annie’s problem. If the numbers do not exist yet, she will say so early and tell you what to measure before you enter.
Do you write for membership bodies and charities as well as companies?
Mostly, in fact. Annie’s background is membership and cultural organisations, where the criteria tend to be about impact, governance and value to members rather than revenue alone. Commercial entries are welcome too. The discipline is the same, the vocabulary changes.
How is this priced?
A fixed fee per entry, agreed in writing before work starts, based on the length and complexity of the submission. A programme of entries is priced as a programme, with the evidence bank built once. No hourly rates, no surprises on the invoice.
Got a deadline? Start with the date.
Send the award, the category and the closing date through the form, or message Annie on LinkedIn. You will hear back within a working day on whether it is worth entering and what it would cost.