Winning awards can boost brand recognition, encourage innovation and create meeting and networking opportunities. Awards that matter are worth the investment of time and money.

Some have a fee so marketing folks, budget dollars for these in 2025. 

Today I attended Fast Company’s video meeting session regarding how to fill out their “World Changing Ideas” awards forms for maximum success. 2024 winners are here. The session was called the “2025 World Changing Ideas Awards Informational Q&A.” 

Senior Editor Aimee Rawlins, Executive Editor, Digital, Morgan Clendaniel and a few others presented. To me, most of the advice applies to creating a variety of PR materials from news releases to pitches. 

They conveyed these nine tips: 

1. Focus on the past 12 months.
2. It’s okay to say, “Not for publication” if it’s too early to disclose information.
3. It matters that you show “capacity growth” with numbers.
4. Don’t use jargon or marketing speak. We can tell when you lift it off of the website. We know marketing jargon. This was repeated a lot and with passion!
5. Describe how it compares to others. Where does it sit in the market?
6. Use the actual name of the solution, project or service. 
7. Don’t use superlatives. Say what it is, plainly. 
8. The words need to explain it as fully as possible without URL links.
9. If a section has a 500-word limit, don’t go beyond that. They read thousands of applications and have to get through them all. 

It takes hours to research these awards criteria and advise clients so I appreciated the information session or “sesh” as some like to say. It was better than collecting and reading a lot of tips material. Plus, I was able to attend a ‘freebie’ senior editor panel.

How Can PR Help You Win Awards?

A skilled PR practitioner is to me, similar to a journalist. They will do the investigative reporting at their company and find out what makes the item super cool and useful and then articulate that efficiently. Apparently, you want to NOT copy paste from the website. 

I appreciated the tips immensely (<excuse the superlative!) because they can apply to any public relations materials that are shared with journalists. 

The application deadline for Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Awards is this Friday, December 6, at 11:59 p.m. PT. 

As an aside, the woman worker image was produced by ChatGPT on December 4, 2024. I asked for an image of a 45-year-old woman office worker with a laptop.

###Michelle McIntyre is the president of Michelle McIntyre Communications LLC, a tech PR consulting firm. She’s on the board of PRSA Silicon Valley. To buy a ticket to the 17th annual Media Predicts gala and panel event happening Dec. 10 in San Carlos, California, visit this link here. A panel of journalists from ABC7, Business Insider, NY Times, and TechStrong, will give you tips on working with them and you can even meet them to say, “Hello.”

Michelle is FromMichelle on BlueSky and she has 2.7 million views on Quora.