Gold Quill – NSWs’ best of the best
The Gold Quills are like the Oscars in the communications world which recognises and awards business communication excellence. It's acknowledged as one of the most prestigious awards programs globally in the industry for strategic communications.
Ahead of the submissions opening in October IABC NSW presented a virtual show and tell event where five winners gave a case study overview of their campaigns and shared key learnings to help others develop their submissions.
What are the IABC Gold Quill awards?
Gold Quills have been around for more than 40 years and is the only awards program that honours the dedication, innovation and passion of communicators on a global scale.
All IABC Gold Quill Award entries are evaluated by international professional communicators with more than 10 years of experience. Most of the evaluators have earned Gold Quill Awards, many are either IABC accredited or certified by the Global Communication Certification Council and all are trained to evaluate entries against established criteria aligned to IABC’s Global Standard of the communication profession.
Entries are scored independently by two evaluators, who reconcile their scores at a Blue Ribbon Panels event held in multiple locations around the world or virtually. Australian entries will be evaluated by a panel from anywhere across the globe.
What are the categories?
In 2020 there were four divisions and 25 categories ranging from:
1. Management - Internal, media, brand, community, government, issues & crisis, NFP campaigns.
2. Research - Conducted during initial stages of strategic comms process.
3. Training - Coaching, media skills, conference, presentation, leadership or comms training.
4. Skills - Special events, publications, digital comms, audio visual, writing.
In 2021 there is a new category on COVID-19-related programs under the management category; COVID-19 Response & Recovery Management and Communication, you can also submit videos, writings, publications and other communication tools done for COVID-19-related programs in appropriate categories under the division 4 category Skills.
The power of helping a business meet its goals
Our first speaker was Megan Osborne from NSW Trustee & Guardian. Their team put together a change/communication program to support the business improve customer service and become more customer centric. The businesses goals were to reduce customer complaints and change employee’s perceptions on what good customer service looked like.
The team was able to align their program of work to these goals by conducting market research, understanding the customer service metrics, analysing complaints and talking to both customers and employees on their perceptions of one another.
Megan said “the key to success of this program was first having a clear understanding of what the business wanted to achieve and then spending the time to understand the drivers and mapping how your comms/change program can improve each driver.”
“To be successful in your Gold Quill submission it’s important to remember that strategic communicators align every program with the goals of the organisation. ”
The importance of meaningful data and metrics
Chris Saxby, Marketing & Communications Business Partner from Aurecon spoke how his team put together a campaign to support the business reimagine what the future of transport in Australia could look like. The team conducted a survey of 1,300 stakeholders and asked them to imagine themselves in 2035 and tell Aurecon about where they had chosen to live, work, how they commute, what foods and goods they purchase and how they prefer things to be delivered.
Once the report was ready the team decided to focus their comms program on the use of social media. This included LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. This approach allowed them to provide the business tangible data on how the campaign was being received, who was engaging with the content and where they could potentially follow up if there was a high engagement from an audience segment.
Some of their metrics included:
• 12k views of the future of transport video on social media including YouTube
• 1k ‘likes’
• 256k impression (numbers of views)
• 1600 website click thoughts from social media
Chris said, “It’s important not to forget the importance of social media - sometimes it can be looked at as a secondary channel. In my experience and especially with this campaign If you want to obtain a large reach and more diverse audience social media channels are the best way to do this.
“A great Gold Quill submission will have measurements to confirm achieving your pre-set targets, along with an explanation of your success. Objective data best way to show the results you have delivered. ”
Focus on segmenting your audiences
Sabrina Muysken, National Content and Thought Leadership Manager at PwC Australia showcased how a Global CEO Survey was utilised as a local campaign. The survey is conducted by a global team which sees nearly 1,300 CEOs across the globe participating but locally the team were solving for two key problems:
● CEOs are time poor and the local market is overcrowded with generic, impersonalised content
● Internal stakeholder engagement was waning, and they were combating campaign fatigue
The success of the local campaign hinged on building strong internal and external stakeholder engagement to encourage a high number of local survey completes. Sabrina showcased how stakeholders were broken into two groups - Partners (500+) and CEOs (800+), the team approached these stakeholders with a highly segmented and personalised campaign to engage them in a meaningful way.
“A focused Gold Quill submission will use the power of linking stakeholder segmentation to a communication approach. ”
Deliver on creativity
As a not-for-profit Rosalie Batistoni, Head of Marketing and Communications Scouts NSW and team often face budget restrictions and need to leverage limited resources in a creative and inventive way.
Scouts NSW has over 17,000 youth and adult members making it one of the largest and most successful youth organisations in the state. Scouts Australia provides young Australian’s aged 5 to 25 with fun and challenging opportunities to grow through adventure. Rosalie spoke about her Zoning in on Scouts campaign, an opportunity to highlight to potential members and their parents the opportunities and adventures that members will experience.
The success and highlights of the campaign and Gold Quill award was careful resource management and bucket loads of creativity.
“A Gold Quill submission delivers an understanding of how creativity, budgets and resources were used. Linking budgets to outcomes and making the judges understand any resource opportunities or constraints is important in any submission. ”
Making value alignments
Ellen Morris Internal Communications Manager at Woolworths Supermarkets was our final speaker for the session. Ellen spoke about an internal campaign related to change communication; customer operating model an intensive 24 week change plan involving over 110,000 stakeholders.
The need was to ensure that every team member was aligned around a new customer operating model and way of working across stores to adapt to changing customer trends. The key to this success was ensuring that a compelling narrative was tied closely to the business values. It took a leader-led cascade approach for the comms with bespoke communications based on roles and teams (including information packs translated in the top 4 languages spoken by teams).
The success of the campaign was due to having a strong ‘why’ and clear business need underlining every decision.
“A Gold Quill submission can be more effective when a communication execution is aligned to audience and business values. A strong ‘why’ will always help the judges understand the purpose and impact. ”
Overarching tips for success
Anthea Cudworth Communication Director and the 2020 Gold Quill Blue Ribbon panel Chair summed up the event with some overarching themes and additional ideas for securing one of those coveted awards:
• Pick the right project
• Choose your division and category carefully
• Plan and gather resources early
• Remember the evaluator is not from Australia
• Describe your audience well
• Understand outcome and output metrics
• Get proof-readers
• Use an IABC mentor
It was incredible to learn about the challenges faced by each of our presenters from the power of helping a business meet its goals to convey the problem solved, to learning about the importance of meaningful data and metrics, about how a focus on segmenting your audiences is a winning strategy to the need to deliver on creativity and the opportunities around making value value alignments. We hope you’ve been inspired to submit your great work in the 2021 entries.
How to enter a for a Gold Quill
If you're interested in submitting a Gold Quill for 2020 submissions are now open. You can enjoy the early bird discounted rate, extended up to 8 January 2021. The deadline is on 20 January 2021 and the late deadline will be on 1 February 2021.
Click here for more information.
Learn how to submit an award in 5 steps here and reach out to one of the speakers, the IABC NSW board or Anthea Cudworth with any questions or support required for your submissions - good luck.
Join us now, and stand tall among the world’s best!