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Reward and recognition with awards – hints and tips

Award ceremonies are a wonderful way to show recognition of hard work and achievement. Often, they are delivered as larger scale events, but they can be adapted for all budgets, scenarios, and formats.

Award ceremonies are valuable as they reinforce company culture and can motivate your team to aspire and achieve.

To put into content what I mean, we recently delivered an Annual Awards evening for a long-standing client. It’s always a grand affair with a large audience that knows what they want to event to achieve and deliver on this. Each year the awards have adapted to deliver on theme, content, attendance, and experience.

Lemonzest has also been able to deliver events that are on a more intimate scale but still pack a punch and achieve the brief.

Hints and tips for planning awards

1. First, write a brief of what you want to achieve. Think about the purpose and this will give you the outline of how the event experience can deliver for you.

2. Incorporate company or industry messaging in the event. This can be through event branding, invites, online content or use of multimedia and AV on either a small or large scale.

3. Share company goals at the awards evening to help engage with the audience and create the mindset among the audience. Not everyone can come away with an award, but you can certainly build engagement and motivate everyone through key messages.

4. Be creative with categories. It’s important to reward winners but you can include categories that are about wider ranging achievements and accomplishments. Maybe an award that is voted for by guests or colleagues.

5. Formal, glitzy, causal, high tech, just some of the elements of how an awards evening can be created. We have worked on pretty much every type and can offer advice for being authentic and creative in any format. Not all awards ceremonies involve a stage and traditional format.

6. Award events can be virtual. Or a hybrid of live and virtual. Typically, awards evenings are in person events but can incorporate virtual elements – messages from sponsors, a good luck message from senior representatives, vox pops of previous winners for example. And don’t forget to film aspects of the awards that can be created as a showreel for afterwards and post event communications or on-demand viewing.

7. Venues – think outside the box of a more traditional awards evening venue. Sure, this should match your brief, but it doesn’t hurt to break with tradition, being unique and using the venue to your benefit

8. Networking – it might not be the first thing you think of when hosting an awards evening, but Lemonzest recommend a networking element and have great ideas for how to do this.

9. One of the most frequent things we are asked about awards ceremonies is how/who should compere the evening. This could include booking a headline grabbing name to host your awards but will come at a cost – there are plenty of alternatives. Think about how you want your event to link together and if this could be delivered by an ‘in-house’ colleague or if external assistance would add to the atmosphere and credibility.

10. Finally, if you host a regular awards ceremony switch up the format. Keep it fresh and with the element of surprise.

Here is a short clip to inspire you! If you have any award specific questions, or, challenges or want Lemonzest magic at your awards just drop me a message.