Are business awards worth it?
Sometimes, and rarely for the reasons the entry form implies. This page argues both sides from the figures we hold, then gives you a three-question test to run before you pay anything.
- 28
- 17
- £220
- 30 September 2026
The short answer
An award is worth entering when three things are true at once: people who buy from you actually follow the programme, you have a real, evidenced project from the judging window, and you will still be in business to use the result next year. Where one of those is missing, the entry fee is the smallest part of what you will spend, and you are better off keeping it.
The straight arithmetic first. Of the 28 UK programmes on our calendar, 6 charge nothing to enter, 16 publish a fee and 6 have not published one for the current cycle. The paid programmes typically take £220 for the cheapest tier before VAT. Every figure is the organiser’s own and you can read the whole fee table here. But the fee is a third of the true cost: a judged entry is 1,000 to 2,000 words of evidenced prose, which is two to four days of someone who knows the work, and a black-tie night is a separate invoice again.
We sell award entries, and we will still tell you this: most entries lose. A strong programme shortlists a fraction of its field, and a company that budgets one entry and one winner’s logo has bought a lottery ticket at the price of a project. The case below is what separates the spend that pays back from the spend that does not.
The case for
Proof that is dated and independent. A buyer shortlisting a supplier has two questions: are you any good, and does anyone credible say so? A shortlist or a win from a recognised programme answers the second one for as long as the year is current, and it does it with an organiser’s name rather than your own marketing copy.
The side effects. Companies that enter seriously tend to point at the same three: the application itself becomes the clearest written account of a project they have, which gets reused in pitches; the team behind the work gets a rare, public credit; and the sales team has a dated reason to email every prospect who ever said “we like you but”.
The deadline does something. An entry date turns “we should write up what we built” into a date with work attached. For teams that mean to do this anyway, the programme is the forcing function, and the judging is a bonus.
The case against
Nobody who buys from you follows the programme. This is the most common way an entry is wasted: the programme is well known inside an industry you do not sell to, or well known among people who do the same job as you and nobody else. A win nobody who matters has heard of is a line on a signature file.
The fee is not the cost. Entry fees on our calendar run from nothing to four figures, but the writing time is usually worth several fees, the ceremony is sold separately, and categories multiply: three entries at a per-entry programme is three times everything. Budget the whole shape before the fee.
There is nothing to show. An entry built on “we had a good year” loses, and deserves to. Judges mark evidenced work in the window the programme defines. If the project you would write about happened before that window, you are entering last year’s news and the fee buys little.
The win arrives with no plan attached. Winners who gain nothing are the ones who treated the night as the end: no press line prepared, no case study, no page on the site, no email. The result sits in a PDF and expires in twelve months.
A test to run before you pay
Name the people who decide whether to buy from you. Would they recognise this programme’s name? If it takes explaining, the win will not travel and the entry is for your ego.
One project, within the judging window, with numbers you can publish: a client, a figure, a before-and-after. If you cannot name it in a sentence, you are not ready to pay anyone to write it.
Decide before entering what you will do with a shortlist, not just a win: the email, the page, the press line. If the plan is “see how we get on”, expect to see nothing.
Where that leaves you. If all three answers hold, the spend is defensible and the next decision is which programme and which category — the calendar of open UK business awards shows deadlines and fees side by side. If the audience and evidence are there but the writing is the obstacle, that is the part we do: an Award Scan is free and tells you which programmes you could credibly enter, and a Complete Award Entry is £495 per application, published and fixed. The organiser’s fee stays theirs and is always stated up front.
Every number on this page is generated from the record we hold on each programme — its own published fee, checked against the organiser’s site and stamped with the date. Nothing here is retyped from memory.
The arguments above are the ones we use when a company asks us whether to enter at all. The test is allowed to end in “don’t”, and this page is the one we keep when it does.