By Elizabeth Stelzer and Clare McAndrew
A few years ago, I wrote a piece about why awards matter. As a PR and marketing professional, I’d heard the questions plenty of times: Are awards worth the investment? Do clients care? Does winning really make a difference?
My answer was always yes. Awards help attract talent, get the attention of prospective clients, boost team morale and give clients another reason to feel confident in their agency partners.
I still believe all of that. Clare recently pointed out another important role for awards: giving great work greater visibility. Brilliant work happens across our teams every day, but it doesn’t always get seen beyond the people closest to it. Awards give us an opportunity to step back, recognise what makes that work special and tell its story to a wider audience.
With those perspectives in mind, Clare and I recently collaborated with the Clio Health team to bring a session on award-winning work to our colleagues at Syneos Health Communications. It gave us a timely opportunity to revisit why awards matter and, importantly, consider what we can learn from the work being recognised today.
The session explored trends among recent winners, the judging process and practical advice for submissions, along with a preview of the 2027 awards program. What struck us was how strongly the conversation connected creative ambition with the real challenges people face.
In healthcare, that connection matters.
The work worth celebrating solves something.
Among the trends Clio Health highlighted were ideas driving cultural conversations, the use of humor and levity, innovation through data and technology, and work designed for overlooked and underserved audiences. Another theme brought them together: solving real problems beyond communicating about them.
That’s a useful challenge for anyone working in healthcare communications. Awareness can be essential. So can a clear message delivered at the right moment. But we should also ask what our creativity helps people do. Does it make information easier to understand? Help someone navigate a difficult conversation? Remove a barrier to care? Make an experience more accessible?
Those questions should be part of the brief from the outset, long before an award entry takes shape.
Recognition gives great work a wider audience.
Recognition also gives great work a life beyond its original assignment. A campaign created for a specific audience can become a source of inspiration for people across the industry.
That matters especially in healthcare, where teams work through complex science, sensitive subjects and significant constraints. Seeing how another team approached a challenge can open up possibilities for our own work.
Clio Health’s emphasis on overlooked and underserved audiences is particularly meaningful here. Recognition can bring greater visibility to needs and experiences that deserve more attention and to the creative approaches helping address them.
A strong submission requires a clear story.
The session also offered a practical reminder: doing great work and explaining it clearly are both important.
Clio Health encouraged teams to think like jurors, pay attention to the medium and category, and make thoughtful use of case study videos and boards. It was a useful reminder that we need to look at our work through the eyes of someone encountering it for the first time.
Can they quickly understand the challenge? Is the idea clear? Can they see how the execution delivers on it? Have we given them the evidence needed to understand what the work accomplished?
We know the context because we lived it. A juror needs us to make that context understandable. The process of preparing an entry can help sharpen how we tell the story of our work to clients, colleagues and future partners, too.
The value reaches the people behind the work.
And there’s something else worth remembering: being recognized feels good.
Our teams put enormous care into their work. Clients invest time, resources and trust in bringing it to life. Awards create a moment to acknowledge that shared effort, celebrate the people behind it and reflect on what made it successful.
They also give us a benchmark and a reason to keep learning.
Thank you to the Clio Health team for spending time with our employees and sharing a closer look at the work, thinking and preparation behind award-winning entries.
We came away with a renewed conviction that awards matter. But their value starts well before a winner is announced. It starts with the ambition to create work that solves a real problem, makes a meaningful difference and deserves to be recognised.
