Tips and Suggestions

Here are a few tips and suggestions from past Flagler Award judges and winners.

Brevity is good, but don’t sell yourself short. 
Our judges appreciate concise writing, but they still need enough information to make a fair assessment. Tell them what they need to know so they can properly evaluate your entry.

Detail is good, but don’t drown the judges with it.
While the judges appreciate good writing and useful details, they don’t need to know the name of every person who attended your event or see every one of the 472 newspaper articles it generated. Nor do they need an hour’s worth of video footage to review. Give them the details they need to understand why your entry is award-winning. (The character count limit will keep you from getting too carried away.)

Give the judges something to work with. 
You must enter something for each required field in order to submit your entry, but please don't put "n/a". If you didn’t have the money to conduct research to prove how successful your brochure was, just say so! The judges will appreciate honesty more than "n/a".

Take it seriously.
Our esteemed panel of judges will be giving up a lot of their time to judge these awards and they take their job very seriously. It is recommended that you do the same when preparing your entry. Passing it off to an intern might seem practical at the time, but judges can usually tell when someone is just doing the bare minimum.

Spelling counts.
Carefully consider the readability of your entry. Misspellings, grammatical errors and typos show carelessness. First write your entry offline, then have a colleague proof your document for typos and punctuation. Do a character count on each section to make sure it falls within the allowable limit. Then, copy and paste your answers into the online form. Entries that are well written and clearly lay out the story of how and why the marketing effort was a success are more likely to win.

Work smarter, even if it's harder.
If you plan to submit an entry in the Mixed Media Campaign category, and then submit bits and pieces of that same campaign in other categories, don't try to cut corners by using the exact same Entry Summary. To copy and paste the same results, implementation and other information from the campaign entry may be a tempting time-saver, but if the entire campaign resulted in a 50% increase in visitors, you can’t expect judges to believe that just one part of that campaign – a single radio ad or brochure, for instance – had the same results on its own. 

Keep your links live.
Make sure that all URLs referenced in your entry are active throughout the period of judging (through June 23, 2023), and check for case sensitivity. Digital creative work cannot be judged if judges cannot access the site.