Commons:Wiki Loves Earth/WLE Resources Center/How to prepare an award ceremony

HOW TO PREPARE AN AWARD CEREMONY FOR THE WIKI LOVES EARTH

🏆An award ceremony for the local WLE winners is a symbolic event where you can gather your winners and celebrate the end of this year’s contest with everyone involved. It is a great tradition for your local WLE community to get closer to each other and for the contest’s visibility. If you are planning to organize an award ceremony for your winners after you have the final results, we recommend you do the following steps.

Step-by-step guide

• Make sure you selected all the winners, and each of them personally is aware of the winning (it's up to you to announce your local results publicly BEFORE or DURING the ceremony);
• Define the people who will be responsible for organizing the ceremony (logistics, speakers, etc.) and discuss the roles and responsibilities with them. Don’t forget to track the preparation itself;
• Choose the format of the ceremony (online, offline, or hybrid?);
• Choose the date and venue (if it’s offline);
• Prepare personal invitations and send them out to all your local winners + it is up to you to invite: the whole organizing team, jury team, additional volunteers, everyone involved in the project, your Wiki community, partners, media, etc.;
• In addition, you can create a registration form and send it out with the invitations;
• If you want to make your ceremony more public, create and share a public announcement.
• Create a list of who confirmed their participation and send those people a letter with all the details;
• If you plan to award the winners with prizes and everyone who was involved in the contest with some recognition, plan in advance your funding for it and which kind of awards you will gift them. Make sure to order it to have everything ready in advance. You can present it during your event or send it as a delivery (if it’s an online ceremony).
• Here are some general ideas of what and to whom you can propose (but everything depends on your wish and budget):

- Winners: voucher for online shopping/gadgets, etc. + WLE-branded souvenirs + diploma;

- Winners of the special nominations (if you have any): WLE-branded souvenirs + diploma;

- Jurors, partners: WLE-branded souvenirs + diploma;

- Organizing team, volunteers: WLE-branded souvenirs + diploma.

• Plan an agenda and prepare a presentation for the ceremony. Find a template of the presentation and proposed agenda, which you can copy and adjust to your needs;
• If you plan to hold an offline award ceremony, you can organize a YouTube or Zoom stream during it (and let the people who couldn’t join offline join online), which you can record and send out later;
• If you have enough budget and your ceremony is offline, as an idea, you can print out the winning images and decorate them in the venue;
• If you have enough budget, you can organize a joint lunch or dinner with the people present at the offline ceremony, as it can be a good opportunity for networking and celebration of the final results;
• If you want to, you can create a feedback form and send it out after the event so people can leave their comments, ideas, suggestions, etc., and you will have more inputs on how to prepare the next award ceremony better;
• Create, publish, and share with everyone a social media post about how your local award ceremony went. We would be glad if you could mention the pages of the International WLE so we can repost it.
• Use some good practices from your other local events because you better know what works best for your community!

Comments and ideas

We wish you to have a great WLE award ceremony!

If you have any more questions or need help, feel free to approach us at wle-team@wikimedia.org.ua.

If you want to add your suggestions, questions, or ideas for this instruction, please leave them here.