Why Shorthand stories win awards
And why you should nominate your own work
An award is recognition of excellent work, and there's certainly value in that — but an award can bring a range of other ongoing benefits, too.
We're used to seeing great stories at Shorthand. For our own annual awards, we and our judging panel have a hard time whittling down a long list of incredible stories to a shortlist of finalists in a few select categories. You can watch our latest awards ceremony and see each of the winners here.
Shorthand stories are being nominated for, and winning, awards and recognition in the wider world, too. The benefits can be much greater than a chance to don some evening wear and chat to industry peers (remember those days?!).
Here we present a few reasons why you should enter your stories and campaigns into more awards, and explain how Shorthand can give you a winning advantage. For inspiration, we also show off a few award-winning Shorthand stories from the last few years.
Why you should enter more awards
No matter your business, there's more than one award available for your work.
As you probably know, there's a wide variety of awards for journalism, communications, advertising, marketing, education, and design. Each of these fields has large, well-respected events, tailored to global entries and audiences.
Within each field, there are also specialty awards for subsections of the profession, and subsections of the globe. And, of course, many award events themselves have multiple categories. A single piece of work could easily qualify for multiple categories in multiple fields and multiple regions. What you might consider a potential entrant for a journalism award may also be a winning contender in awards for information design, education, science communication, infographics, photography, and more.
Similarly, a marketing campaign may be a contender for awards in web design, advertising, commercial photography, or business communications.
Each entry presents possible benefits with long-lasting positive impact across your business too, such as:
Verifiable superiority
Social and industry validation will always surpass personal claims. Anyone or any brand can claim to be a leader in their field. However, it's another thing entirely to have the claim backed up by an award that represents the endorsement of consumers, peers, or a panel of experts.
When your story or campaign wins an award, your brand — whether business or personal (or both!) — is promoted alongside proof of its quality.
You'll likely receive a digital award to include on your site and in other promotional material, and search engines will forever link your name to the word 'winner'.
Promoting your services and attracting new clients
The design, advertising, and marketing industries host some of the most coveted and fiercely contested awards. Many agencies are known to create campaigns specifically aimed at award wins. Why? The prestige is worth gold for retaining existing clients and picking up new ones.
An award win for an agency is a point of differentiation that reassures clients that they are dealing with the best. If you're a newer player, an award win can amplify your brand recognition and create the cut-through needed to prove that you have the chops to compete with the big guns.
As well as the publicity that will flow directly from the award organisers, winning an award provides you with new PR opportunities too: something to include in your own campaigns, and to distribute to industry press.
Gaining extra attention for a cause
Charities, not-for-profits, and other causes rely on exposure to generate awareness and raise donations. Every extra set of eyeballs drawn to an issue is a chance to educate, change behaviour, and/or raise funds. An award win (or even a shortlist placement or nomination) for a cause-based story or campaign can help important messages to spread much further. Additionally, it can extend the life of the campaign via mentions in social media and industry publications — before, during, and after the award ceremony itself.
A story created for a charity or not-for-profit needn't be limited specifically to awards in that space either, but could be nominated for general marketing, design, journalism, photography, web design, and other awards: providing a chance for the message to reach whole new audiences.
Multiplying a marketing budget
Most marketing campaigns follow a similar trajectory: the campaign is launched, it gains interest, the budget runs out, the campaign ends. With skill and luck, the campaign is a success and there's a chance to repeat it. Award entries and wins can provide an extra boost to a marketing message by harnessing another entity to help spread the word and keep a campaign top-of-mind on someone else's budget. In some cases, the value of the exposure given to a campaign through an award win can surpass the budget of the campaign itself.
Motivating employees and attracting new talent
Want to let your employees know that you value their hard work and dedication? Nominate their work for an award. It shows that you believe their efforts and skill to be worthy of wider recognition. And when it comes to recruiting, well: who wouldn't want to work for an award-winning employer?
Relationship building
Whether it's with a valued client, your staff, or your team members, preparing for an award entry and attending an awards event is a great way to solidify existing bonds and form new ones.
Why Shorthand stories win awards
Shorthand is used by an incredible array of storytellers, many of whom are truly leaders in their fields. Without a doubt, the majority of any award win is down to their talent. That said, Shorthand does provide a bit of an award cheat-code (of course, we mean that in the best possible way!).
The Shorthand editor is simple to use, yet handles a range of tricky web design and development details automatically: things like ensuring that a story is responsively rendered on desktop and mobile, that images are suitably compressed while retaining detail, that SEO and accessibility are built in, and that adding animation and interactivity is as simple as clicking a button or two. The full-screen impact and simple scroll-based interaction of Shorthand stories are regularly recognised as key factors in award nominations and wins.
All that means that Shorthand authors can spend their time focussed on the details of the story itself: producing an end result that readers, and award judges, can instantly recognise as simply beautiful, powerful, and engaging.
Got some examples?
We know of a slew of Shorthand stories that have been nominated for, shortlisted, and won awards. There's far too many to list them all, but below we present some of our favourites from the last few years.
If you have a favourite award-winning Shorthand story, or if your own story has been shortlisted for or won an award, be sure to let us know.
CASE is The Council for Advancement and Support of Education: a global non-profit association dedicated to educational advancement. Each year the CASE Circle of Excellence Awards recognize hundreds of institutions whose talented staff members advanced their institutions through innovative, inspiring, and creative ideas.
University of Cambridge picked up two CASE awards in 2021: a Silver award for Writing / Series or Collection for their This Cambridge Life collection of stories produced with Shorthand. The series highlights the people of the university, from the college gardeners and students to prize-winning academics. The award judges said of the series:
"It’s so well-executed that all the behind-the-scenes work the editorial team did to find, curate, and edit these pieces is almost invisible to the reader. The fact that’ it is produced in-house at no additional cost makes this all the more noteworthy."
The Gold award for Writing / Online went to the University's Cambridge University Stories series, also produced with Shorthand. The series comprises long-form media-rich content spotlighting research, profiles, and the challenges of the higher education sector.
The Digital Health Awards recognises high-quality digital health resources for consumers and health professionals. Their Spring 2021 awards recognised Deeply Rooted: An Endocrine Web Special Report on Race and Diabetes with the Gold award in the Digital Health Media / Publications category.
Endocrine Web's story uses beautiful custom animated illustrations and infographics to show why race is one of the biggest risk factors for diabetes, and to pose solutions for addressing the deep race-based inequalities in medicine.
In a field of 312 projects from 11 countries, the online submissions for the 22nd European Newspaper Awards are an impressive list. The Arab News story "Juhayman:40 years on" took an award for multimedia storytelling and cross-media projects.
Arab News' beautifully illustrated story on the history of Arabic Caligraphy was also a Digital Merit Winner in the Best editorial creative section of the Society of Publication Designers Awards and a Digital Medal finalist.
When Reed Elsevier transformed into data analytics provider RELX, they took it upon themselves to transform their own communications strategy, too. That involved shifting to Shorthand, and picking up a gold award for Best use of digital media in Communicate Magazine's Corporate and Financial Awards of 2020: an award celebrating organisations that have effectively integrated digital media into their communications outputs.
The award organisers said of the win:
"It was the use of new digital media engagement approaches, and its ability to adapt its approach along the way to build new audiences, that made this submission stand out for the judges. "
The Amnesty Media Awards 2020 shortlisted Escaping the Chaos, a project by University of Kent BA student Kenneth Sanchez, in its Student Journalist category.
If you are a journalism or comms educator, Shorthand offers the opportunity to give your students access to the same tools that the world's best teams use to produce stories — free of charge.
If you are a journalism or comms student, winning an award with your Shorthand story shows the quality of your work, your ability to use professional tools, and gets your name in front of potential employers.
Tiempos de malaria en Venezuela is an exceptionally-produced series of stories from Prodavinci, and a deserving winner of an award for Journalistic Excellence in the Best Health Journalism category of Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa (Inter American Press Association) awards. Prodavinci proudly explain that: "Thanks to the variety of formats used (from chronicles and reports to visualizations of data and comics), Tiempos de malaria en Venezuela has served as training material in medical schools and research institutes."
The Scottish Press Awards, in their 41st event, awarded The Digital Team of the Year to The Courier for its "Shaped by a River: Tales of the Tay" special series. Richard Neville, Head of Newspapers at DC Thomson Media, summed up the value of the award in recognising the quality of journalism at The Courier. "The awards, in particular The Courier’s award for Digital Team of the Year, highlight the strength of our digital journalism. This is especially important during the current lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, as our teams work hard to deliver the latest news to our communities in print and online."
The Yemen Peace Project was nominated for a Kantar Information is Beautiful Award for their piece: "Visualizing Yemen's invisible war". The Information is Beautiful Awards were established to celebrate excellence and beauty in data visualization, infographics and information design.
Arizent produce and publish a range of financial and professional services media. They use Shorthand to "design and publish our integrated media content with more speed and flexibility, and to expand the range of our users' engagement" (read our case study here). Two Arizent Shorthand stories for their Financial Planning publication were recognised in awards in 2019. "Pay Day" won a Graphic Design USA American Web Design Award , while "Keep quiet" was a finalist in the Folio Mag Eddie & Ozzie Awards: recognising excellence in uncompromising journalism and gorgeous design across all sectors of the publishing industry.
The Trash Isles project from LADbible drew attention to the amount of plastic waste in the oceans by registering a floating mass of plastic as an independent nation, and then encouraged readers to become citizens. The campaign came away from the Drum Marketing Awards of 2018 with a "highly commended" acknowledgement in the category of Digital Strategy of the Year, and then won the category of Social Media Strategy of the Year: both categories with stiff competition from large global brands.
If you're looking for more inspiration, we've listed hundreds of our favourite Shorthand stories here.
We'd love nothing more than to help you win awards for your stories, and to celebrate and promote your achievements.
If you are already a Shorthand user, you may like to join us in a live training webinar, where you are welcome to ask questions of our editorial experts (we also have some pre-recorded sessions here).
If you haven't yet tried Shorthand, we are sure you'll find it to be the easiest and most enjoyable way to build immersive feature stories for the web. And, you can publish your first story for free. We can't wait to see what you create!
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