Shooting for a Gold Quill

Communication World, June-July, 1997 by Downs Matthew

The world loves a winner, and everyone in the world loves to win. Athletes perform heroics to score the winning run. Politicians move heaven and earth to get elected. Dog fanciers spend a lifetime trying to breed a grand champion. Communicators shoot for a Gold Quill. We all hope to win. Some of us do and some of us don't, and in the tradition of poker players, the winners tell funny stories and the losers holler deal.

Sometimes they holler "raw deal."

Competition just naturally spawns argument. You'd think that the creative arts would be free of contention, but that's not the way it works.

Back in 1956, when I was serving as president of the old Society of Associated Industrial Editors, I had a vice president named Alton D. "Ziggy" Sears. It was Ziggy's job to manage SAIE's annual awards program. Ziggy was conscientious, so he was disturbed by the criticism that he and his committee got from entrants about the rules governing past contests. They were too stingy with the awards. There were too few categories. Periodicals having nothing in common were forced to compete with each other. Periodicals with small budgets were forced to compete with periodicals with large budgets. It wasn't fair. There was no justice. And too few people had a chance at recognition. In short, the beefs in 1956 were pretty much the same beefs judges hear today.

But Ziggy took these complaints to heart. He decided to do something to accommodate the view that too few people had a chance at an award. He introduced what he called the Pacemaker Award. Any editor entering anything in the contest in any category automatically got a Pacemaker Award. Ziggy reasoned that anyone who thought enough of his or her publication to enter it in a contest was, by definition, a pacemaker and deserved recognition for the effort. All you had to do to get a Pacemaker Award was to enter. However, Ziggy did not explain this to the entrants, or even to me.

We had a couple of hundred entries that year and each entrant was notified that he or she was to receive a Pacemaker Award. They were all pleased. People who had been trying to win an award for years were delighted that they had finally scored. Each of them assumed that the award was for editorial accomplishment - not just for entering. About a hundred Pacemaker winners showed up at the awards ceremony to receive their honors, some of them escorted by a retinue of company officials to witness the rewarding of the incumbent genius. Then, when it became apparent that there were more than just a few Pacemakers around, Ziggy was asked to explain the qualifications for it. When the winners found out, they were furious. They complained that they had been given an award for nothing. So now all the criticism went the other way. There were too many awards. The awards were meaningless because anyone could win. There were no standards of excellence, no true recognition of merit, no substance to the achievement.

At this point, I concluded that there is no entirely equitable way to write rules for business communication contests. Judges can be no fairer than they know how to be, and they all have their personal prejudices and biases, their pet peeves. They are, it seems, only human.

That's why IABC has institutionalized the procedure of judging so as to establish standards and build into the judging, process as much objectivity as possible. I have been a party to a good bit of this work in the course of serving as a judge, and I have sat in meetings and heard impassioned debate about how to assure fairness and guarantee wise decisions. In fact, some of the language in the rules is mine. Over the years, these debates. and cumulative wisdom have helped Gold Quill become a very good program indeed, and one in which you can participate with confidence.

You may find it reassuring to know that the rules did not spring fully grown like a competitive Minerva from the forehead of some industrial Jupiter; that they are still being polished and perfected. Today, we don't compare apples and oranges. The rules make a genuine effort to eliminate the impact of a big budget. They stress substance over form. And they seek to relate all judgments to common standards that apply to and are appropriate for all entries.

In general, the most basic criterion in today's competition is: How well does the communication meet the objectives that the sponsor has set for it? Thus, the judge is not asked to look at two communications and decide which is the prettier, to judge a beauty contest, if you will. Instead, the judge is asked to consider whether one has done a better job of meeting its objectives than another. I can assure you that many a big-budget program that didn't use its assets wisely has been tossed out in favor of a low-budget program that did a superb job with the means at the communicator's disposal. Money, then, is not a guarantee of an award. It's what you do with the money that counts with the judges.

Now I will admit that scoring well in this or any contest may not be as easy for those who have a very low budget as it might be if you had plenty of money to work with. A talented and hardworking editor with money will usually outscore a talented hardworking editor without money. But I don't see this as necessarily unfair. The contest, after all, is a test of the goals and intent of the sponsoring organization as much as it is of the skills of the communicator. An organization that understands the value of communication and is willing to invest enough money in it to make it pay off shouldn't be discounted because another organization is too short-sighted or penurious to do the job right. Provision of an adequate budget is one test of whether an organization is serious about carrying out an effective communication program. So I see no reason to excuse or make allowances for those who plead poverty.