How to write a good Impact Award entry

Have you got something in mind you want to enter for The Impact Awards?

The Impact Awards recognise the outstanding contribution of knowledge exchange, knowledge transfer and/or commercialisation activities for:

  • Contribution to Business
  • Contribution to Society
  • Outstanding KEC initiative
  • International contribution

  If you've got a project you think qualifies for one of these categories, make sure you can answer these four questions with a resounding "yes" before submitting your entry:

  • Have you described how the entrant(s) have made an essential contribution to enable the intellectual assets arising from research to progress towards impact and the delivery of public benefits?
  • Have you described how your approaches to specific KEC delivery added value and contributed to progressing research towards impact?
  • Have you described and documented the extent to which users (businesses, charities and public sector organisations etc...) are, or will be, benefiting from these activities?
  • Have you explained how the award money would be used to support future plans in delivering impact through KEC?*

Don't forget these do's and don'ts:

DO

  • Make sure you properly answer the questions above
  • Clearly highlight the impact the KEC Team had - what did they contribute to your success?
  • Tell us why the project is/was important
  • Describe the contribution  it made
  • Spell out acronyms
  • Get a colleague to proofread your entry - do they understand what the KEC team contributed and why this was outstanding?
  • Leave yourself enough time to put together a solid entry
  • Remember each research organisation can submit more than one entry per category providing the projects described are significantly different.

DON'T

  • Provide excessive contextual information
  • Pad out the entry  just to meet the word limit
  • Be vague - where possible, give specific figures and details - don't make the judges second guess what you're trying to say!
  • Forget to stay within the word count

The competition closes for on April 16th - don't forget to leave yourself enough time to prepare your winning entry! * Only institutions eligible for RCUK funding are entitled to receive the award money.