Wakefield Business Awards – how to use AI to help with your award entry

 

🏆 Wakefield Business Awards – how to use AI to help with your award entry

Businesses are often short on both time and money 💸, so entering the Wakefield Business Awards could feel like it’s never going to get to the top of your to-do list.

But with evidence that award-winners improve both their sales 📈 and reputation ⭐, and with brilliant networking opportunities 🤝 at the award ceremony, being on a shortlist could be a big boost to your business.

Here’s where AI comes into play 🤖: not by writing your entire entry, but by helping you craft it faster and more efficiently.

 

💡 Proficient prompting

To stop ChatGPT or Claude (my preferred AI platform) from making things up, you need to give it details to work from.

First, give the AI the awards website link 🔗 and an overview of the key points you want to make across your entry in the category you’re tackling first. This is about stepping back and thinking about your overall story.

(One of our big tips is always to create a different entry for different categories as they are assessed against different criteria.)

There are three main movie plots 🎬 that the Awards Writers team like to look for when telling awards stories:

• 👠 Cinderella – about improvement
• 👹 The Grinch – about transformation
• 🕵️ James Bond – about overcoming a monster

If you’re entering the Business Growth Category with an improvement story, you may have grown by 25% 📊 by instigating a rigorous nurture programme that increased sales to existing clients. This is useful information that you want to reflect throughout your entry.

Next, tackle the entry section by section 🧩, giving the AI both the question and criteria for the section, as well as some bullet points covering what you want to say in response. You can also give it a word count ✍️ to write to — but don’t take AI’s word for it when it says it has only written 350 words… it doesn’t count very well 😅.

Make your prompt as detailed as you can to make sure the response you get is as close to factual ✅ as possible. If you’ve already written a blog or LinkedIn post about your success, add this link as information the AI can draw on.

 

👩‍💻 Apply human

This is the critical step.

You need to check the details 🔍 to make sure what you’re about to add to your entry is factual (AI is well-known for making things up). You’re likely to want to tweak what it has written to make it sound more like you/your organisation ✨, and to change the emphasis of certain parts of the story.

Check the word count again 📏. You can ask the AI to reduce it for you, but you’ll need to keep checking to make sure it is accurate.

Once you’re happy ✅, add your information to the online entry form and get ready to submit 🚀!

 

⚠️ The risks of using AI in award entries

While using AI to help write your award entry may save you some time ⏳, it doesn’t come without risks.

Recent research suggested 42% of awards judges would mark down an entry which was obviously written by AI 📉. That’s why you need to carefully go through what any AI agent has written for you, to make it sound less generic and more like your business.

Even if you think the information you give to your AI assistant is confidential 🔒, it’s hard to be 100% sure — so don’t give it any commercially sensitive details.

And watch out for it hallucinating 🤯 and confidently stating information about your business that just isn’t true. Judges will be looking for credible, believable stories 📖 with the evidence to support them — not fairytales.

📅 When do you need to have your award entry done by?

This year’s deadline for entries is 17th July ⏰.

 

Louise Turner – Chief Wordsmith – Wordsmiths Unlimited & Awards Writers ✍️
Head Judge 👩‍⚖️