Banner Brunch Award Nominations Are a Great Way to Give Appreciation

By Dara Quackenbush, AWC Austin President-Elect
You don’t have to be an AWC member to nominate or to win an award (although some categories are member-only awards). The most important thing is to nominate.

As the saying goes, it is better to give than to receive. This is especially true when it comes to Banner Brunch awards. As someone who has both won an award and has nominated someone who has won an award, I can tell you there is great pride when you nominate someone who wins.

I’ve always enjoyed the awards at Banner Brunch. Unlike the ADDYs or the Clarions, the Banner Brunch awards look at the person as an individual, not whether she created some awesome advertising campaign. There are a lot of industry awards that honor people for good work, but the Banner awards reward someone for being a good person – having a great body of work, supporting the communications industry, serving as a mentor, exuding creativity or serving AWC. Sometimes I think in business, individuals forget about being good people. The Banner awards are about honoring the individual for service above and beyond.

Two years ago I received the Mentor Award at Banner Brunch. This truly was an honor because many of my former students nominated me for the award. Knowing that the award was from young professionals whose lives I touched, made it meaningful to me.

Yet I was more touched last year when one of my former students received the Anne Durrum Robinson Creative Initiative Award. Although I saw the special spark in Emily Fraser when she was in my Writing for PR class at Texas State, I could not have been more proud of her than I was when others recognized her for her work with AWC Austin’s social media presence. Including myself, four people nominated Emily for the award. Seeing her family there — Emily’s mother and brother drove in from Houston for Banner Brunch, and her fiancé (now husband) was there as well – made me smile.

Some AWC Austin members get a fun rivalry going – seeing who can nominate the most winners for the year (Lisa Maxwell always says throughout the years, she’s nominated the most Banner winners). I think the fun rivalry goes to show how much our organization loves to support and recognize others. The Banner Brunch awards are not about seeing how many awards you can earn, but how much appreciation and support you can give to the special communicators in the Austin area.

Nomination deadline for the 2012 Banner Brunch awards is Jan. 21. To view the award descriptions and/or to nominate someone take a look at the AWC Austin website.