Press releases
A win release is not read by the public — it is read by journalists, analysts and procurement teams searching your name. Write it for them.
Decide whether it is worth one
Not every award earns a release. Wire distribution costs money and a release nobody picks up still costs you the hour it took to write. Issue one when at least two of these are true.
- The program is recognised by name inside your industry — a trade journalist would know it without looking it up.
- You won a category, not a "finalist" or "highly commended" placing.
- The win is tied to a customer result you are allowed to name.
- You are in a live sales cycle, funding round or hiring push where third-party validation moves something.
- It is a first — first time your company has won it, first in your region, first in a new category.
If none of those hold, publish it as a news item on your own site instead. It still gets indexed, still gets linked from the award page, and costs nothing.
Timing and embargo
- 1.
Confirm the embargo date and time in writing
The organiser’s winner pack states when results may be made public, usually to the minute and in a specific timezone. Breaking it can cost the award.
- 2.
Draft and approve before the embargo lifts
Legal, the named customer and the award organiser all need to sign off. Start five working days ahead; customer legal is always the long pole.
- 3.
Issue within 24 hours of the embargo lifting
Award news decays faster than product news. On day three it is no longer news to anyone.
- 4.
Pitch two or three named journalists directly, an hour before the wire
A wire release is a record, not a pitch. Coverage comes from the direct email.
Structure
Standard release furniture, in this order. A journalist decides in the headline and first sentence whether to keep reading, so every fact that matters is above the first quote.
| Element | Rule |
|---|---|
| Headline | Under 100 characters. Company, award, category. No adjectives. |
| Subhead | One line adding the result the award was won on. |
| Dateline | CITY, Country — Month D, YYYY — |
| Lead paragraph | Who won what, from whom, for what work. Complete on its own. |
| Body, 2–3 paragraphs | The problem, the work, the measurable outcome, the scale of the program. |
| Quote 1 | Your executive. About the work and the team — never about being honoured. |
| Quote 2 | The customer or the award organiser. This is the quote that gets used. |
| Boilerplate | Standing two-sentence company description. Never rewritten per release. |
| Media contact | A named human, direct email, phone. Not press@. |
Keep the whole thing under 450 words. A release that runs to two pages is edited by a journalist who has never met you, or not used at all.
A worked example
Northwind Logistics Wins 2026 Supply Chain Innovation Award for Cold-Chain Monitoring
Platform cut spoilage losses 34% across 1,200 refrigerated vehicles in its first year
MANCHESTER, UK — March 14, 2026 — Northwind Logistics has won the 2026 Supply Chain Innovation Award in the Cold Chain category, announced last night at the Supply Chain Council’s annual conference in Birmingham. The award recognises the company’s vehicle-level temperature monitoring platform, deployed across 1,200 refrigerated vehicles for eleven grocery and pharmaceutical clients.
Cold-chain spoilage costs UK distributors an estimated £480m a year, most of it discovered only at delivery. Northwind’s platform reads temperature at four points per trailer every 30 seconds and reroutes or reloads a shipment before the load is lost. Across the first twelve months of deployment, participating clients recorded a 34% reduction in spoilage write-offs and a 19% fall in insurance claims.
"The engineering here was not the sensors, it was the decision in the ninety seconds after a reading goes wrong," said Aisha Karim, Chief Technology Officer at Northwind Logistics. "Sam Whitfield and the platform team built something a driver can act on without picking up a phone."
"We were writing off two trailers a month and calling it the cost of doing business," said Martin Doyle, Operations Director at Fenwick Grocers. "We have written off two in the last year."
Distribution
- Publish it on your own newsroom first, at a permanent URL. Everything else points here, and this is the page that ranks for "[company] award".
- Pitch three named trade journalists individually. Subject line is the headline; the release goes in the email body, not attached.
- Use a wire only if you need the syndication footprint for procurement or investor searches. National wires are rarely worth it for an award.
- Send it to the award organiser’s press contact — most maintain a winners’ media page and will link back.
- Send it to your customers’ marketing contacts. A named customer’s own communications team will often run it too, which doubles the reach for free.
Add the release URL to the award record in AwardsPulse. Next year’s entry will ask what publicity the win generated, and the link is the answer.
Common mistakes
A headline built on "is proud to announce".
Company, award, category, in under 100 characters.
Executive quotes that only say how honoured everyone is.
A quote that adds a fact the body does not have — why the work was hard.
No numbers anywhere in the release.
At least one figure the award was won on, plus the scale of the program.
Naming a customer without written sign-off.
Get the customer’s communications team to approve the exact sentence in writing.
press@company.com as the media contact.
A named person who answers within the hour. Journalists work to same-day deadlines.
Publishing the release and never linking it again.
Link it from the award page, the LinkedIn comment, the media kit and the sales deck.