What is your Award Program Really Recognizing?

It’s late summer so that means it’s individual award season again in the nonprofit community. As associations look forward to their annual conferences, Awards Committees are formed. Nominations are announced. Sometimes self-nominations are encouraged. Deadlines are extended to make sure there are candidates to review.

Nominees must fill out lengthy applications citing example after example of what “they have done” for the profession. Someone is selected to be singled out for “all they do” for the organization. (Note the word change: from profession to organization.)

The problem with individual awards programs is that they are designed to recognize only one person, and what is recognized is not necessarily a contribution to the profession or the industry. Often times these awards recognize support for the association. That is not the same thing as contributing to the profession. Awards programs seem to recognize cash donations and Board or Committee service as opposed to sharing time, energy, and intellectual property with your colleagues to make the profession’s community better.

Save the angry postcards: I am not saying you should not recognize volunteer service on the Board or a Committee, and you should definitely recognize cash contributions or donations.

What I am saying is that EVERYONE who contributes should be recognized.

If we live in a world that is built on networks and communities and working together, how does it serve the greater good to go through a process every year that elevates one person over others who have also contributed?
The question we should ask ourselves is this: Do these individual awards programs really serve a purpose any longer?

Micro-volunteering is so ingrained in associations now we don’t really talk about it any longer. We are in a world where participation and contribution can be made at increasingly microscopic levels, thanks to the benefits of technology, and a lot of good contributions are made by people who are overlooked or ignored.

As associations continue to adapt and respond to the smack upside the head delivered by the pandemic lockdown, we must rethink everything we have been doing, including recognition of those very people who make the association: the entire membership.