Why The Brilliance Awards Are Different

/

When InspirED established the Brilliance Awards in 2016, we knew we wanted something different.

We wanted to focus on private schools and the incredible work done by their marketing, enrollment, and development offices. (That’s you all!)

Private/Independent Schools Only

The Brilliance Awards are open to PK-12 (PG) private and independent schools around the globe and businesses that work with those schools. Hard stop.

The Awards are not open to higher ed, B2B, B2C, corporations, or any entity other than those mentioned above. The goal is to keep the playing field even and restrict the competition to “just us.”

(Yes, we are aware that even among “just us,” budgets and size of teams vary widely, but previous Brilliance Awards winners have demonstrated that “small doesn’t mean limited.”)

Changes, Adjustments, Experiments For You

Each year, we tweak the categories to adjust for trends (e.g. printed vs. printed and digital annual report of gifts), accommodate events (e.g. COVID…who could forget?), and test new categories (e.g. “Small School” and “Holiday Video”). We also fine-tune the judging criteria to be applicable to each category.

And this year, we lowered the early bird entry fee even further (to $30) to make the awards more accessible to schools with smaller budgets.

Entry Form Stability and Simplicity

One thing we haven’t changed much over the years is the entry form. It asks for

  • info about your school — name, location, grades, gender(s) served, website

  • info about you — name, title, email

  • what should appear on the certificate should you win, and

  • who are the team members who worked on the project

Boom. Done.

What? No Abstract?

We want to celebrate you and want to make it easy for you to have a chance at winning. An easy entry form is the first step in that process.

Each year, a handful of folks ask us why we don’t include an “abstract” or write-up about the entry such as goals, metrics, target audiences, calls to action, execution, results, etc. We do recognize the value of such a report, especially for internal purposes.

Yet we also know our audience.

Our audience — private school marketers like you — are by and large stretched to the max in their roles and responsibilities. When InspirED was founded in 2013, one of our goals was to shine a light on the woefully limited resources leadership assigns to one of the most important offices of the school. (Some progress has been made in that area, but there’s still a long way to go.)

So InspirED doesn’t want to burden school marketers who are already overworked with the need to write an abstract — a piece that, when done well, requires a great deal of time and effort to craft — simply to enter a MarCom competition. We want to celebrate you and want to make it easy for you to have a chance at that.

The criteria our judges use for each category are set so that they're able to judge entries as someone who is part of the intended audience would judge it. This means without a deep explanation of the piece, but instead with an eye towards assessing how effectively the entry communicates the intended message.

These Awards Are For You

InspirED created these awards for you. They exist…

to honor your work,

to celebrate your work, and

to shine a spotlight on your work.

Because you are brilliant.