Have you entered Isle of Man Newspapers’ Awards for Excellence yet?

Entries close on September 20 so it’s time to getting filling in those entry forms.

There are 16 award categories offering opportunities for businesses of all sizes, individuals, public sector teams and charitable organisations.

They include New Business/Innovation; Excellence in the use of Technology; Charity, Cultural and Social Enterprise; Volunteer of the Year, and Business Person of the Year.

If you are entering you will want to know something about what the judges are looking for and how the judging process works.

Trudi Williamson, deputy chairman of Isle of Man Newspapers, said: ’In a small island community, our biggest challenge is to get people to understand the complete transparency and impartiality of the judging.’

The 16 awards judges come from the widest possible range of backgrounds, encompassing business, the public sector and charitable organisations.

At the start of the judging process they are all paired off and each pair is given two categories to assess.

They will individually mark each one on a number of set criteria.

Key criteria include being current and also sustainable: the judges are looking for achievements from the last 12 months, rather than things that happened several years ago, but they also want to see that these are not just a flash in the pan but will continue into the future.

Following their initial assessment each pair will get together to decide their top choices in each category.

Deb Byron, director of IT at Hansard, is a long-time awards judge.

She said: ’Entries that are written with passion will always catch the judge’s eye.’

On the final judging day, which will be held this year on October 5, all the judges get together and each pair of judges will put their results to the full judging panel to be discussed as the final results are decided.

Often these discussions can get quite intense as the judges are also passionate about excellence and have their own view of what constitutes it.

It will sometimes happen that one of the judges will have an involvement with one of the entries in a category where the result is being finalised: they are asked to leave the room so they are not party to any discussions and they will not know the name of the winner until awards night itself, in November.

There will, however, be three finalists in each category, except for Business Person of the Year, and all of them will be notified so that they can attend on the night and have their photographs taken for the programme.

So, time to get entering now. You can find full details of all the award categories and download entry forms at www.excellence-awards.im

A new award category this year will be Workplace Wellbeing and you can read an article in next week’s Examiner about initiatives in this area.