Tips for Creating a Winning Pegasus Award Submission

Posted by admin on Sep. 5, 2024  /  Subscribe 0

By Chantal Boeckman, VP of Marketing & Membership, PRSA Dallas

It’s award season for the Dallas public relations community! Each year PRSA Dallas honors the most outstanding public relations, strategic communication and marketing efforts performed by PR professionals in our local community with the Pegasus Awards.

To help entrants prepare their submissions, we recently hosted a webinar featuring previous Best in Show winners Jo Trizila, founder and CEO of TrizCom PR; Teddi Cliett, director and practice lead with Three Box Strategic Communications; and Christopher Ruth, senior director of public relations with Buckner International who shared their top tips for creating winning submissions, along with helpful advice from Kenn Dixon, president of PRSA Dallas.

With the 2024 deadlines fast-approaching, here are some highlights from the webinar that will help and/or inspire you to enter this year.

Note that unlike past years, there will not be an extended late deadline. The last and final deadline is Friday, Sept 13.

We invite all public relations, communications and marketing professionals from every type of organization - small, medium and large agencies, corporations, nonprofits and independent practitioners to enter the Pegasus Awards in the spirit of showcasing the stellar and effective creativity and talent we are so fortunate to have in the DFW area. There are even awards for Student of the Year, which is free to enter, and Educator of the Year – something for everyone.

Now on to the tips!

Perfection is not the goal

We get it. Perfectionism is an inherent trait for many PR professionals, but what our pros stressed is that judges aren’t looking for perfection. They’re looking for an understanding of and a sincere effort to demonstrate best practices in public relations with a focus on Research, Planning, Implementation and Evaluation (RPIE).

It’s okay if not everything in your campaign went to plan (we all experience a few surprises along the way) and it’s okay if the campaign didn’t exceed or even meet its goals. If your campaign demonstrated exceptional examples of public relations, communications and marketing practices, be open in your submission about the challenges you faced and how you dealt with them. And if after reflecting on your campaign’s outcomes you conclude you’d do a few things differently, share that learning with the judges. It will go a long way.

Research is not rocket science

Everyone finds the research section of their submission intimidating. We all assume that winning submissions will be those that conducted high-end primary research surveying thousands of people with a price tag to match. Our pros assured us this is not necessary to secure a Best in Show award. In fact, it is rare that a submission would include extensive third party research.

Our pros explained that we all do qualitative research all the time – it’s part of our day-to-day work. Research can be desk research about your target audience; reasoning behind your media list; client interviews; leveraging your own social media channel with informal surveys or polls – anything that helps you understand your target audience and align to the business need your campaign is addressing.

What is critical for your entry is that you always come back to your research and explain how your insights informed your decisions, planning and tactics. As one pro advised, find the common thread and refer to it throughout your submission to always trace back to how your research informed the campaign from beginning to end.

Remember that objectives and goals are more than clicks and clippings

When you outline your objectives and goals, remember to tie them to a business need. Why did your company or client invest in this project? What did they believe it would help them achieve? You’ll want to demonstrate to the judges that you understand the connection of your work to business results and that the research you conducted and tactics you chose were all focused on achieving clear objectives and SMART goals.

Don’t overthink the PDF

For submissions, you do have to be clear and succinct because you are limited to one page. But you’ll also have an opportunity to provide supplemental materials to showcase your work. Don’t feel like you have to create anything new for your submission - simply share your actual work - you can share screenshots of your research notes, your media lists, insights from interviews. You can use the structure of your submission to guide the order of the materials to demonstrate the work you did at each stage.

Yes, showcasing tactics and results are fun and exciting, but remember to show the judges the work that was instrumental in building your campaign and achieving your objectives.

Evaluation can be the easiest part

Another daunting part of a submission can be the evaluation section, but one of our pros shared that Research is usually her longest section, and Evaluation is her shortest. Be sure to share what you and your team learned. If you conducted a post-mortem upon the project’s conclusion, use that as the core of this part of your submission. Judges of course will want to know what your results were, but they also want to know what you learned – what about this project made you and your team better practitioners and how will you up your game next time.

Why enter the Pegasus Awards?

As one of our pros shared, we are here to help elevate each other. When we choose to showcase our work we’re also choosing to share our ideas and our learnings with others in the industry so we can all help each other get better and prove why the work we do is essential to achieving important business objectives.

One last tip: PRSA members can read and download winning award entries at the national level on prsa.org. You’ll need to log in to find the entries.

Want to learn more tips and hear straight from our pros? Click here to view the full webinar with Kenn, Jo, Teddi and Chris. Email [email protected] if you have questions or issues accessing the recording.

We look forward to seeing you at the 2024 Pegasus Awards in November! Stay tuned for more details.

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