Q: What is best practice now?
A: At TTG Media, we believe that the secret to staging a successful awards lies not only in executing each stage seamlessly but also in creating an engaging and memorable programme that culminates in a remarkable celebration, all while maintaining the balance between revenue and cost and delivering on our partners’ objectives.
Establishing the purpose of your awards is a great starting point. What are your objectives and who are your target audience? Who will your sponsors be, and how can you deliver effective outcomes for them from the event? Hosting a kick-off meeting to discuss these with your team is always our first action. Once these are established, you can start to think about the finer details of your awards programme, such as your awards categories, criteria, who you might enlist to judge the entries, where you want to host your event and the overall look and feel of your awards ceremony.
Promotion is key; start marketing your awards early and across targeted channels — at TTG Media, we launch our programmes nine months in advance of the event. Incorporate storytelling into your marketing campaign by highlighting previous winners and providing a clear blueprint of what makes an award-winning company. It’s all about creating a narrative that makes people excited to participate and see the value in winning.
Post-event engagement is equally as important. We keep the excitement alive by sharing a highlights video the following day and emailing winners their on-stage photos to celebrate their success.
Collating feedback is also crucial and it provides valuable insight to help enhance future events.
The right venue and reliable suppliers are critical to the success of an awards ceremony. The wrong venue and lacklustre dinner can significantly affect the overall experience, and you want attendees to leave with positive memories that encourage them to return year after year. Equally, a disengaging host can dampen the event’s energy so it’s important to choose a dynamic host and include entertainment throughout the evening. One thing we have learnt at TTG is that you don’t necessarily need to spend lots of money on a celebrity host or act; finding talented lesser known acts can be just as effective for some events — and can make a direct impact on your bottom line.
Successful awards are clearly profitable ones, and while keeping costs down is on every business’s checklist, it’s also important to ensure you’re selling tickets for a fair price and sourcing sponsors and suppliers who align with your business values. We pride ourselves on not working with certain businesses that do not align with our values and have turned away sponsorship as a result. We find that our attendees appreciate us sticking to our values and being transparent, and this only strengthens our place as their trusted travel media source.
Sustainability and diversity should be a huge consideration to any successful awards event. TTG’s mission for ‘Smarter, Better, Fairer’ travel runs through the core of everything we do, specifically our events, and by that we mean every decision has environmental impact and accessibility at the forefront in mind. At all our awards, we serve a vegetarian-first menu, allowing guests to opt in to a meat alternative should they wish. Making this small change significantly reduces the carbon footprint of our event. We also ensure any venue we host at is fully accessible and that there is dedicated ‘safe space’ for those who may need it. Having a diverse representation across our awards categories and judging panels also make our awards accessible and attractive to all.
Lastly, provide valuable insight to your partners. With budget restrictions due to the cost-of-living crisis, it’s crucial for businesses to be able to demonstrate results from their investment. At TTG, we produce post-event reports with clear metrics from the event so that they can see the success of their investment with us.
Taking these steps, we believe, is best practice to ensure your event is memorable, inclusive and impactful.
Q: How do you see it changing in the future?
A: We’re already seeing a major shift in the need for events to be more purpose-led, tech-driven and eco-conscious. Awards are no different and will need to evolve alongside these rapid changes.
Underrepresented groups are receiving more visibility and recognition and the need for events to lead on this will only grow in the future. Providing non-alcoholic options as standard is also going to become ever more present as the sobriety movement grows in popularity.
The same goes for sustainability and social purpose. Attendees are becoming more concerned with attending events that align with their morals and beliefs and where their attendance contributes to a socially responsible cause.
In the future, we will also see artificial intelligence continue to change the landscape of events with a stronger need for data-driven insights and potentially the metaverse becoming a feature.
Three top tips
1. Choose your venue and suppliers carefully as these can make or break both your experience as an event organiser and your guest experience.
2. Be purpose led and have inclusivity and sustainability at the core of your decision-making.
3. Think longer term and create a profitable model so that you can continue to build and develop your awards in the future.
Join Charlotte and the other contributors to our Events Special on Wednesday, 13 November for a Q&A webinar when you will have the opportunity to put questions to them.
This article was included in the Events Special, published by InPublishing in October 2024. Click here to see the other articles in this special feature.
