It’s TAMI Award season and that means it’s time to dig out those kudos emails, screenshot analytics, and dust off your award entry writing skills. Last year, we had almost 450 award entries and we’re hoping for even more this year.
What’s New – Best Small Shop
We’ve heard your cries, small shop folks! This year we’re introducing the Best Small Shop award category. This is specifically for those who have two or fewer communications professionals in their main communications department/division. We wanted to highlight the great work our one-man-bands (and two-people-bands – it just doesn’t have that same ring) are doing.
The way it works – the TAMI Awards Committee and I came up with six major areas of work we do on a regular basis. These areas include social media, visual arts, publications, marketing plan or campaign, internal communications, and communications planning. Entrants should pick the four areas they would like to enter and should not enter more than one project to one of the six categories.
Is this a lot of work? Absolutely. However, the Awards Committee felt the winner should submit a variety of work to show judges the organization’s overall communication skill level. Just being a finalist for this category will be a huge honor.
Going through the process to enter the Best Small Shop category also comes with a bonus. By the time you’re finished, you’ll have written four award entries that you may also submit to those individual categories. For example, if you enter a great Poster/Flyer as part of your Best Small Shop submission, you already have the writing done to also enter the stand-alone Print Poster/Flyer category as well.
If this formula works well for our members, the TAMI Awards Committee will consider expanding this category format for our large and medium shop people as well.
What’s New – Increased Plagiarism Protection
This year, we also made it a priority to strengthen the integrity of our awards program by rewriting the “Statement of Original Work” entrants must acknowledge via checkbox before they submit their entry. The TAMI Awards Committee and I have also finalized the plagiarism allegation review process for the organization that establishes a uniform process for how those concerns are handled in the future.
As someone who has had her organization’s work copied by another city (outside of Texas), it’s not a great feeling. I know several others who have also experienced this and witnessed those organizations win national awards for work that was not substantially their own.
While these updates were important, we understand it’s difficult to come up with a 100 percent original idea and we all find inspiration in each other’s work. However, we all know there’s a difference between finding inspiration and plagiarism. TAMIO wants to honor everyone’s original work and ideas in our awards program and these added layers will help us accomplish that.
What’s Going Away
As you might have guessed, we’re saying goodbye to our COVID-specific award categories. If you do have a COVID-related entry, please submit it into its appropriate existing category.
Anything Else?
Since last year was our first year to truly use our new Award Force platform, we learned a few things. As in, writing the award show script takes a long time when you’re trying to condense award submission projects into a few sentences and clipping video entries to show at the banquet.
Therefore, we’re asking for our entrants to do a couple extra steps for us. One, enter a 1-2 sentence description of your entry. That way, we word it exactly the way you want us to as we call your name for a TAMI. Secondly, you must provide us a 30-second clip of any video entry. This means, send us your favorite part of the video to show the audience during the banquet. If your video is only 30 seconds long – good news, just enter the same link in that field.
Have Questions?
Email or call me! My email is molly.fox@bedfordtx.gov and my office number is 817-952-2126.
Molly Fox, CPC
Vice President for Awards
Director of Communications
City of Bedford