Why should you enter the Belle and InsideOut awards, and House & Garden’s Top 50 Rooms competition?

How is your “awards game”?

Entering your projects into awards programs is a great way to raise awareness of your practice, and it may even help you connect with a future client.

However, awards are a game of skill and chance - there is skill in the projects themselves, your entry text, and an element of chance around whether this year’s jury will see the merits in your project. The jury also determines whether it speaks to the current issues and concerns that the profession is grappling with.

Awards are a great channel for you to explain your design ethos and approach, and to inform and educate future clients about how your process responds to the zeitgeist.

Many architects think that preparing an awards entry is a straightforward exercise. You answer the questions, upload your photos and drawings, and then sit back and wait for the jury’s decision.

Few realise that it’s possible - and desirable - to really hone your entries to ensure that your limited word count both responds to the criteria and conveys the core message of your project. You can also tailor your text to appeal to jurors and future clients, by making sure you strip out exclusionary language. This approach to awards entries takes time, practice and commitment.

A great way to practice - and polish - your awards entries is to identify some low-cost programs and use them to test your writing and presentation skills, in a relatively low-risk setting.

Then, you can apply the knowledge you gained from those entries to inform your future entries - the ones where you really want to make an impact in your preferred sector.

So, this blog post brings together three low-cost, low-risk, potentially high-reward competitions that may be of interest; especially if you have newly completed residential, commercial and hospitality projects that you want to highlight and promote in the latter half of this year.

Which awards programs are still taking entries this year?

The first competition is Australian House & Gardens’ Top 50 Rooms showcase, which will feature in the magazine’s November 2022 issue. This program costs $150 to enter - you can submit multiple rooms on a single entry so include several rooms and/or projects if you have them photographed and ready to promote.

Entries are due by Friday 26 August 2022 and you can find the entry portal here.

Up next is the Belle Fanuli 2022 Interior Design Awards, which costs just $50 to enter - making this a great program to hone your entry skills and get a feel for how to respond to the stated criteria, with less overt themes and concerns informing the interior design sector.

Entries are due by Friday 9 Sept 2022 and you can find more details including how to enter here.

And thirdly, InsideOut’s House of the Year competition is free to enter, and it offers a cash prize of $10,000 for the overall winner, which will be an architect (as stipulated in the terms and conditions). This is well worth your time and effort if you have a house that is likely to appeal to the jurors - familiarise yourself with the criteria and a few recent issues of the magazine to make sure yours does.

Entries are also due by Friday 9 Sept 2022 and you can find more details including how to enter here.

Why should you enter these awards programs and competitions?

1. If you entered some of your projects into the Institute’s Chapter Awards, or the HOUSES awards or other interior design programs earlier this year, you could just pull out your previous entries and tweak them for these latest programs. Because they are range from free to $50 to $150 to enter – there will be very little cost involved, apart from your time to put the entry together.

2. Alternatively, you may have a couple of newly completed projects that have been photographed since you submitted your earlier entries, in which case you can get them some coverage in these magazines. You will also expand your reach across a wider range of awards programs and competitions this year.

3. Another great thing about these consumer magazine programs is that if any of your projects are featured – either in the shortlist or as a winner – they will be seen by potential future clients. This is not necessarily the case for some of the other industry-based awards programs, whose media partners may not necessarily have the same reach and penetration among your target audiences.

4. You don’t need to enter an entire house into these awards programs; there are categories for best kitchen, best bathroom, best outdoor space, best use of brick in residential, best hospitality space, best use of colour, and more.

5. Yet another reason to enter these awards is the fact that doing so guarantees your projects will be seen by magazine editors. I’ve talked before about how time-poor editors are – many now look after multiple titles – and it’s getting more difficult to get a response from them about individual submissions. By entering your projects into these awards programs, you know your work will be seen and considered by the judges and editorial teams. And even projects that don’t win awards might be selected for publication at a later date, making this a great way to ensure your images are at least reviewed.

6. And my last reason to enter? It goes back to the point I made at the start of this article. If you submit your project and don’t win any prizes this time, the process of putting your entry together and experiencing the entire sequence of events first-hand is an easy and inexpensive way to practice your awards-preparation skills. That includes selecting your best set of images, preparing text that appeals to three key audiences, collating your project credits and all the other details you need to include. Preparing these free and low-cost entries also allows you to test the waters and to see what kind of project descriptions and story-telling techniques resonate with these judges. Enter these awards and you’ll have more experience to draw upon next year, or when you next choose to enter an awards program that incurs a more substantial entry fee.

What are your next steps?

• If you are keen to refine your awards preparation skills - and find out what jurors are looking for, and how to speak to three key audiences - you can purchase my recorded of my CPD training from 2021. You can find all the details on this page.

• If you’d like to purchase the 2022 Awards Calendar, which contains details of these programs in a side-by-side comparison, you can do that here.

• If you have already purchased the 2022 Awards Calendar and would like to access V6 - updated on 15 July - you can grab it here.

So, given that these programs are inexpensive to enter (i.e., free / $50 / $150 to enter, respectively) and I’ve just given you six good reasons to do so, what are you waiting for?