How to launch an award: the 30-day plan to opening entries

Most awards do not fail on gala night. They fail because the call for entries was finished too late: categories decided in one meeting, criteria written afterwards, jurors invited a fortnight before the deadline. The plan below reverses that order — four weeks, each producing one result that makes the next possible. Budget four to six hours per week.

Week 1: purpose, audience and categories

Answer two questions before anything else happens. First, what should the award do for your organisation — visibility for a topic, member retention, editorial substance for a trade title, revenue, or several at once? Second, who exactly should enter? Write each answer as one sentence and add the number you will judge the first season by: a realistic entry count.

Categories follow from those two sentences, not the other way round. A category earns its place only if you can name five organisations that would plausibly enter it. Work backwards as well: a shortlist of three to five names needs far more entries behind it, or it stops being a selection. Four well-populated categories look more confident than ten half-empty ones. Add a newcomer or special category in year two, once you know where demand sits.

The week ends with a category list approved in writing. Where these four weeks sit in the wider season is covered in the timeline for a full award season.

Week 2: criteria and terms of entry

Criteria are not boilerplate; they are the build instructions for your entry form. Define four to six per category, each with a name, a defining sentence and the evidence required. Then fix the scale — 1 to 5 or 1 to 10, weighted or not — and keep it identical across categories.

The test: can the jury answer every criterion from what the form asks for? If you want impact scored, the form has to ask for figures, a time frame and a baseline. Otherwise the jury scores prose style. Turning criteria into a usable score sheet is the subject of the article on the jury scoring sheet.

The terms of entry take shape in parallel. They should cover who may enter (registered office, size, membership), the project period that counts, deadlines, fees and the cancellation rule, the language of entry, usage rights to text and images, confidentiality, conflicts of interest in the jury, and the exclusion of legal recourse. Add privacy notices with a legal basis per data flow: the entry rests on contract performance, newsletters and gala photography on documented consent. With a platform, you are the controller and the vendor a processor — that requires a data processing agreement under Article 28 GDPR. The article on GDPR and award entries works through the detail.

Week 3: fees, pricing phases and the jury

Paid entry is standard for association and trade-media awards in German-speaking Europe. If you charge, decide the amount and the staging now: pricing phases are how you shape the timing of entries without chasing people.

Consider a reduced member rate and a rule for non-profit entrants. What you cannot do is raise prices after the launch. Fees also carry VAT, and entrants expect a compliant invoice, not a payment confirmation.

Invite the jury in the same week — before the launch, not after. Jurors are booked months ahead, and their names are the strongest argument in promoting the call. The invitation should state three things: the workload (around 20 entries, 10 minutes each, online, between 3 and 20 March), the conflict-of-interest rule, and what the person gets out of it — visibility, network, a view across the sector. Invite more people than you need and confirm every acceptance in writing.

Week 4: channels, dry run, launch

Now the copy. You need one page that answers every question without anyone phoning you: who may enter, what it costs, by when, how judging works, who decides, what winning gets you. Add a short FAQ, an email to your list, a LinkedIn post, a paragraph partners and sponsors can paste, and a note for the trade press.

Then the dry run. Three people submit a test entry, at least one from the target group and without prior knowledge. Time them. If an entry takes more than half an hour, cut mandatory fields rather than hope for discipline. Launch on a Tuesday morning, not a Friday, and schedule reminders now: 14 days, 7 days and 48 hours before the deadline.

The first ten days after you open

Read the first entries one by one. If a field is filled in wrongly again and again, the problem is the field, not the entrants — sharpen the wording, but add no new mandatory fields now. Follow up personally with ten to twenty organisations you want in the field; a targeted email does more than advertising. And record every refusal with its reason: that list is the groundwork for next year's call.

How to launch an award without living in a spreadsheet

For the first three weeks you need nothing but a document and some meetings. Only week four is technical: form, payment, invoices, reminders, jury access. Honestly, an award with 25 entries and one jury round can still be run on a form tool and a spreadsheet. The effort simply does not scale down neatly — jury packs, invoices and chasing missing files stay tedious even in a small field.

In software, those building blocks are the core of Laureo: categories and criteria, pricing phases (early, regular, late), Stripe payment with 0 % commission, PDF invoices in your own number range, an eligibility check, a draft mode for entrants, and jury allocation that respects conflicts of interest. Starter is € 1,790 and Professional € 3,490 per season (net, 12 months); self-hosting on your own infrastructure starts at € 7,900 (Sovereign). The feature overview sets out what sits in which tier.

Against it: an award run every second year with 25 entries and one jury round is hard to justify against a form tool. The value appears with recurring seasons, several categories and more than one jury round. Either way the four weeks above stay yours — software takes over the administration, not the decisions.

Fees in the phase table are illustrative. Status July 2026. Laureo is a product of State of Innovation GmbH, Vienna (FN 680807 m), built out of running the HR Award at the HR Inside Summit.

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