August 2025 PRSA Dallas Letter from the President
Posted by admin on Jul. 31, 2025 / Subscribe 0
It’s officially award season for PRSA Dallas. Submissions are open for the 2025 Pegasus Awards as of August 4, which means now is a good time to talk about the real ROI of PR awards.
The ability to submit to the Pegasus Awards in a more cost-effective manner is the reason I originally joined our chapter, though I’ve since discovered infinite value in membership and board service (and that’s an entirely different blog).
I’m an extremely competitive person who loves to win. And while PR and marketing awards are a great way to scratch that competitive itch from a professional standpoint, it’s not the reason I’m passionate about creating and submitting entries.
There’s also value in being a finalist and seeing your organization’s name listed alongside some of the top brands and agencies in North Texas. In just the past few years, award-winning Pegasus entries have featured major brands like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Purina, Salvation Army, Walgreens, NCAA Women’s Basketball, Peppa Pig, and Buckner International (this is my update, and I get to decide what constitutes a major brand).
Whether you win or not, you can point to that list as validation that your team is on the same level as organizations like Buckner International [again, this is my list. If you want to define what is and isn’t a major brand, then I encourage you to apply to our 2026 board of directors (ABR; IYKYK)].
And while validation is great, it’s not what I consider the true ROI of the Pegasus Awards and other PR and marketing awards.
Submission criteria for the Pegasus Awards is based around the public relations RPIE model: research, planning, implementation (execution), and evaluation (results). Entries are judged on how well these four areas of a campaign or tactic are defined and analyzed.
You might have the most creative campaign ever that yielded national news coverage, but if your entry does not thoroughly state your research methods, audiences, objectives, strategies, tactics, results, impact, and more, you will not win an award.
For me, the true ROI of these awards is how they help us to be better PR and marketing professionals. They force us to better connect the dots between organizational challenges and organizational results through the work we do to build and maintain relationships between our brand and stakeholders.
The process of creating award entries is especially beneficial to newer PR practitioners or those in a specialized role. When your day is spent focusing on news coverage, social media posts, or event planning, it can be hard to see the high level value of your work for the organization. Crafting an award entry allows you to take a step back and think about the big picture and the impact your work has on organizational goals rather than your singular area of focus.
A long time ago, when I was a younger PR professional, I rarely thought about the research that shaped my objectives and strategies, and I often rushed through the planning stages to get to the results. After all, results are what everyone is after.
Even if I didn’t stop to think about those things at the time, my work was still influenced by the client meetings I attended (primary and secondary qualitative research) and demands for SMART objectives. Award entries encouraged me to reflect on those areas and how I could improve. Thinking strategically through an RPIE framework gradually became more intuitive for me.
There is a reason why games are integrated into the way we learn as children. I remember our grade school classes celebrating any time we went to the computer lab to play “The Oregon Trail,” even though the game was teaching us about history and geography. And I definitely spent hours each week completing math and spelling workbooks my parents purchased because they involved games (and rewards).
Industry awards are like an adult version of “The Oregon Trail.” The competition and the accolades are a way of tricking our minds into learning and improving. And while I have no scientific proof of it, I’m sure dopamine is somehow involved.
But if the ROI of becoming a better PR professional and better employee for your company isn’t enough, then just think about those beautiful gold and silver Pegasus trophies.
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