Patience Jones: Hello and welcome to As Built, the podcast from Graphicmachine about architecture firms, buildings, and how both get built. I'm your co-host, Patience Jones. With me is...
Brian Jones: Brian Jones.
Patience Jones: Your other co-host. Thank you for joining us. It is award season again. When is it not award season? It's definitely award season. So, we wanted to talk about how to make the most of award opportunities, because they can crop up everywhere.
Brian Jones: They really do. And they can get crazy expensive for entry fees if you are entering everything.
Patience Jones: Yes. And you can feel like you have to enter everything, because you see somebody else's, or it's plastered on every email newsletter you open. So, the first thing to managing awards stuff is knowing which awards are a good fit for you and for your firm.
Brian Jones: That can be a little trickier sometimes. I think we all have an idealized version of who we are, and so sometimes admitting that we probably aren’t going to qualify for certain awards might take a level of self-awareness that can be a little difficult. But here we are.
Patience Jones: Yeah. That's tough. I mean, the first cut should be one that's not so existential, which is, do we do the thing that the award is for? There are firms that, despite the fact that they don't design aquariums, will submit for the best aquarium of the year using some other project because they're so convinced that, "Well, once the judges see this other project that I did, it won't matter that it's not an aquarium." It is going to matter that it's not an aquarium. If your firm doesn't do the work that the award is for, it doesn't matter how great the award is, it's not for you right now. Don't bother.
Brian Jones: I call that the shoe horn. You're just trying to force it into place, and I think probably one of the most common things that happens in that space is the completion date of a project and trying to tweak the completion date just enough to meet the requirements.
Patience Jones: Yeah, like, “This building was finished 15 years before the cutoff for the project date, but since they just put a new awning up, we can probably say that it finished last year.” Nobody is fooled by that, and people know and then they're just irritated with you.
Brian Jones: And a lot of times, people that work for these organizations are there for more than one year, surprisingly, and they may remember you. It's a good thing to note.
Patience Jones: It's the person who wasted their time, and you don't want to be that person.
Brian Jones: No.
Patience Jones: You need to read the instructions thoroughly. It sounds really tedious, but there is no universal app for awards. Every organization, publication, everything does it slightly differently, and it can be down to something like, "Please submit all of your photographs in TIFF,” or “Please make sure that your application has the date in European format.” Something really, really small and simple, but if you don't do exactly what they're asking for, you've given them a reason to throw your application out.
Brian Jones: An important side note to that is that just because that award was done with a particular thing last year, that might have changed from year to year, and it's worth revisiting the instructions again. Maybe they added a new system or maybe they are looking for a particular format of images or any number of things.
Patience Jones: Exactly. Even the delivery of the awards. Don't take for granted that you can submit the entire thing through email, or the entire thing in a hand delivery. There may be some weird hybrid. They may use a portal system. You need to go over all of those details with a fine-toothed comb, including the deadlines. And there may be more than one deadline for awards. Some places have a deadline by which you have to tell them that you intend to apply for the award, and if you don't meet that deadline, then it doesn't matter. You're not allowed to submit. So, really, really, really, especially if you've done it in previous years, just go through, maybe have a couple of people in your office read the award requirements and make sure everybody understands them.
Brian Jones: For awards that are on a web-based platform, and if it does allow you the opportunity to see what the full scope of the entry is through the web platform without submitting it, that can often be a very useful exercise to understand what may not have come through clearly in the directions, but that might actually be a critical piece of information that you're going to have to go and collect before you're ready to submit the award.
Patience Jones: Sometimes, the deadlines include deadlines for questions. So, after a certain point, no one will answer your questions about, you know, what if I only have this file format or I can't get the portal to work or can I include this type of project? So, again, really, really, really read all the directions, try to get as much information as you can from a portal, even from previous award winners from prior years. Look at their applications, look at their projects, and just get as much information as you can before you start down the path of applying for the award and submitting for it. Because it's a lot of work. Dollars aside, it's a lot of time and it's a lot of work.
Brian Jones: That is all very true. And all of these come from real-world experiences. This is not like a made-up fantasy list of things that could go wrong on an awards submission. This is very much based-
Patience Jones: We're not just catastrophizing.
Brian Jones: No, this is very real. The other thing that's kind of important, too, is from a photographic standpoint, making sure that you know if there any rights issues related to your photographs that you need to get cleared before in advance. Frequently, the photography that you use is what is ultimately used in the publication to showcase if you were to win the award and just making sure that you have everything in place that you need to before that happens.
Patience Jones: Many organizations are now becoming more savvy about that, so in the application itself, it will say you have to identify who the photographer was for each of these photos and give their contact information and confirm that you have the rights to submit them for this award. Be aware of what we're calling “unofficial pay-to-play.” For some organizations and publications, it's not that the awards are granted completely without merit, but if you buy a ticket to the awards ceremony, if you buy an ad in the publication or the awards program, if you get a subscription to something, then it always seems that those places have a better chance of getting this award than places that don't. You can make the decision about whether you want to do that or not, but if this is an award that you really, really want, you feel like you have a good chance of getting it, it probably behooves you to buy the ad, buy the subscription, buy the tickets to the dinner, whatever you need to do to just give yourself that much more of an advantage. If you don't really stand a chance of getting the award, if you look at what the work was from the previous year, you know there's probably not a good chance, it's probably not going to make the difference if you buy a table at an award dinner. They're not going to say, "Oh, you know, wow, you were really behind these other people, but then you bought a table, so here's your gold medal." But if you are close, consider it. You want to give yourself plenty of lead time. Awards take a while to prepare submissions for. You don't want to turn something in that's just sort of half-baked because you ran out of time. Things always take longer than you thought. Things are always more difficult to find. There's going to be some piece of information that you really, really have to hunt for. So if you find out about an award that's due next week, put it on your calendar for next year. Don't bother trying to turn in something meh in a week or driving your team completely crazy and tanking all of your client work so that you can scramble to get this in. It's not worth it.
Brian Jones: On that front, too, part of the preparation is all the written content assets that might support that and making sure that they are accurate and have been vetted before they get into the final piece. You know, one of the worst things that can happen is trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube, as it were, once that has gotten into the awards mechanism can be very challenging.
Patience Jones: Yeah, depending on the type of client that you work with, those clients want to give permission or deny permission before you submit their project for an award. And oftentimes, the organizations will want to know, do you have the client's permission to do this? If the client's hemming and hawing, if you can't get ahold of the client, and it's down to the wire, you're not going to be able to submit that project. Or worse, you do and then you have to withdraw it because it turns out the client doesn't want any sort of public award for its project. Make sure you follow up to confirm that your submission was received. So many times, a portal goes down, somebody's email box is full, the courier dropped the thing off at the wrong building, whatever it is, just follow up with the person that's in charge and say, "I just want make sure you received my application." And the time to do that is the day that it's due or earlier, not five days after the deadline passed, because if they say, "No, we didn't get it," then there's not much that they're going to do about it. If you were nominated for an award, you want to make sure that you thank the people that nominated you. Lots of awards are done by nomination. Sometimes you know who did it, sometimes you didn't. If you are told, though, it's just a really good, kind, karmic thing to do to thank the person or organization that did that. You don't know if you're going to win or not, so you need a publicity plan. I was going to say, “if you win, you need a publicity plan,” but-
Brian Jones: But that's already too late.
Patience Jones: ... you need one. Yeah. It's like writing your Oscar speech. You need one. So what goes into the publicity plan?
Brian Jones: You want to make sure that you understand how you're going to feature it on your website, and that goes into what it, what the award was and why it won. That is often a great place to start. You can determine if a press release is warranted. In this day and age, I would argue that a social media post is more effective for you. A press release can still be, if it's a truly substantial award that is unique or something that people should know, then that's often a good thing to consider as well.
Patience Jones: If you did the project with other partners, be those general contractors, tradespeople, whatever, that can be a really nice joint press release between everybody saying, "We did this," depending on who's giving the award and what it's for.
Brian Jones: Fair.
Patience Jones: You also want to attend the event if it is something that's being celebrated in an event. I know a lot of people don't like going to these things, and I totally get it. But if you're up for an award, it just looks really bad to not be there. And sending somebody who has no relationship to the project and is brand new at your firm because you would rather be home is also not okay. The people who worked on the project really, really need to be there. When you're talking about the event or the award, you also want to make sure you don't overstate it. Because there are so many awards, we've kind of got “award washing.” Awards are great no matter what they're for, no matter how big or small. If you get an award for something that's a very relatively small award, celebrate it for what it is. Do not post things on social media that say, "Oh my gosh, this is the most competitive award in the world, and we won it." People will know that that's not the truth.
Brian Jones: It’s also easily findable.
Patience Jones: You'll just come across as a bit deranged. So don't do that. Just accept it for whatever it is. It's an award, and it's great, and celebrate it exactly as it is. You definitely want to make sure you add that award to all your existing marketing materials, too.
Brian Jones: Sure.
Patience Jones: Website, project sheets, brochures. And if your client doesn't already know that you won, you want to tell your client, because they get really excited about that. Whether or not they're going to allow you to broadcast it publicly, they will be very excited and very proud. So, you want to make sure that you celebrate that with them as well. You want to explain to your team what the award is and why you got it, because, especially for larger firms, not everyone is going to know what the award means, what the criteria was, and that's something that helps boost morale and it helps for future projects as well. Whether you win or not, you put the competition on your calendar for the next year, because there's always another year. There's always another chance to try. That's probably the biggest thing, is knowing why you're submitting for an award. Are you submitting because you believe you have a good chance of getting it or that you deserve it? Are you submitting because it's a bit of a moonshot, but it's good practice to submit for the award? Are you submitting so you can tell your client that you've submitted their project for an award? Those are all perfectly valid reasons. But you have to allocate your time and your resources accordingly. If you're doing it because it's good practice, then approach it that way.
Brian Jones: That's all good.
Patience Jones: Okay. Brian gets an award for being the quietest person on the podcast. That is all we have for this week. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time.
