The Queen’s Awards Office is super busy preparing for our big, pre-Palace winners event next Tuesday afternoon. We did manage to squeeze in a trip to Cambridge yesterday where Kerry and I talked to some local businesses who intend to enter this year’s awards. They asked us to share some top tips to help steer them in the right direction.
Here's some of our advice: -
- It may be sensible to print various sections of the pdf to give to eg finance colleagues to work on while you complete other areas of the form. You don’t have to complete your form in one sitting – you can enter the information you have ready and come back to it later (just always remember to save!).
- It’s a good idea to set out your commercial figures to see if you meet the criteria, looking at the strength of your overseas sale growth %s, level of earnings, % of exports to total sales and overall growth over the period of the entry etc. It’s important to be aware that any dips in overseas earnings (however small and for whatever reason) will mean that you have negative growth and therefore haven’t met the criteria so your entry won't proceed any further.
- For the narrative parts of the entry we advise you to compose your answers in Word and then cut & paste into the online form. Remember to spell check and be mindful of the word limits on the questions - but do use them to full advantage.
- If you’ve correctly submitted your entry you'll receive an e-mail from the Queen’s Awards Office with a unique code beginning with ‘QA’. If you do not receive this e-mail or an error message pops up on screen, you need to contact us straight away as we may not have received your entry.
- Although the Award is valid for 5 years, you don’t have to wait until it expires before re-applying for another one.
We’ll share plenty more entry tips with you in the coming weeks so keep an eye out for them and let us know if you need any questions answered…
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