The OpenWater Blog

Reasons Why Associations Run Awards Programs. The answer might surprise you.

It’s actually pretty simple:

1. To represent the professional purpose of their parent association
2. To represent the purpose of their association and to further their goals and reflect their values.

Creating an income stream and boosting your exposure are simply by-products of a successful and popular awards program. The key is “congruence” (ie. agreement or harmony). Let’s take the American Advertising Federation (AAF) as an example.

About AAF: The American Advertising Federation, the nation’s oldest national advertising trade association, and the only association representing all facets of the advertising industry, is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and acts as the “Unifying Voice for Advertising.”

AAF Mission: The American Advertising Federation protects and promotes the well-being of advertising. This is accomplished through a unique, nationally coordinated grassroots network of advertisers, agencies, media companies, local advertising clubs and college chapters.

About “The American Advertising Awards”

The American Advertising Awards represent the true spirit of creative excellence by recognizing all forms of advertising from media of all types, creative by all sizes and entrants of all levels from anywhere in the world.

Basically, if you’re an advertising agency and just created an awesome TV commercial for Nike (or if you’re a smaller agency: perhaps a new logo you created for a local restaurant), you want the industry to know that you’re the “best” advertising agency in the United States. Therefore you submit that commercial to The American Advertising Awards in hope that it wins. If you win, you get to put that on your marketing material, get publicity, and most likely dramatically increase your sales.

AAF sets the standard for Advertising “greatness” and it make sense that they bestow awards for that industry. It’s congruent with their mission statement by recognizing all kinds of advertising agencies.

Take a few minutes and think about your awards program. Is your mission accurately reflected in your awards? To learn more about association awards, check out our guide:

Timothy Spell

Timothy Spell co-founded OpenWater in 2007 with the goal of helping organizations tackle and better manage the oftentimes overlooked awards and contests industry. As an author and speaker in the awards industry, Timothy provides unique insight on how to use awards to boost membership, social media followers and search engine traffic.

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