There’s something slightly ironic about working in communications. We spend our days finding the story. Spotting the thing worth talking about. Helping organisations celebrate their people, their progress and their impact.
And then, when it comes to our own work?
We move on to the next thing quicker than FINAL_v7 appears in the shared folder.
Campaign launched. Tick.
Engagement up. Great.
Behaviour changed. Brilliant.
Impossible deadline somehow met. Phew.
Right. What’s next?
For an industry built around telling stories, we can be remarkably bad at telling our own.
And with entries for the 2026 comms2point0 UnAwards open, but closing soon on 29 October, we reckon it’s time to change that.
As proud supporters of the UnAwards, we’re big believers in giving brilliant communications and the people behind them the recognition they deserve. Not just because winning an award feels good (although it absolutely does), but because there’s real value in stopping to appreciate what we’ve achieved.
So, before you dive headfirst into the next deadline, here’s why we think it’s worth blowing your own trumpet.
Before we rush onto the next thing…
Comms moves quickly. There’s always another campaign to launch, another channel to feed, another stakeholder to convince and another urgent request that apparently needs doing yesterday.
In the public sector especially, there’s rarely a shortage of important things competing for our attention. So, when something goes well, pausing to celebrate it can feel almost indulgent.
It isn’t.
Taking a moment to recognise good work is more than an opportunity to pat ourselves on the back. It gives us a reason to look properly at what we did.
- What were we trying to change?
- What was the idea?
- What did we learn along the way?
- What actually worked?
- What would we do differently next time?
Those are useful questions. In fact, they’re questions we should probably ask more often.
And that’s one of the great things about entering awards. They give us a reason to step away from the day-to-day and reflect on the work, the thinking and the difference we’ve made.
Even if we don’t come home with a trophy.
Recognition isn’t vanity
Perhaps part of our reluctance comes from the idea that talking about our own successes feels a bit… uncomfortable.
Nobody wants to be the person endlessly shouting about how brilliant they are. But there’s a fairly large gap between self-congratulation and giving good work the recognition it deserves. Because behind every successful campaign is a group of people who made it happen.
Sometimes they had a healthy budget, plenty of time and a beautifully straightforward brief.
Sometimes they had £42.63, three working days and a senior manager whose aspiration was to “make it go viral”.
Both can produce work worth celebrating.
And particularly in public-sector communications, great creativity doesn’t always arrive with a huge production budget attached. It might mean making an incredibly complicated service simple to understand. Finding a way to reach people who aren’t listening. Changing behaviour. Building trust. Or coming up with something genuinely inventive despite having very little to work with.
That work deserves to be seen.
Awards can be useful – even before anyone wins one
Yes, there’s the trophy. The ceremony. The LinkedIn photo where everyone is looking delighted while trying to subtly angle the award towards the camera.
But there’s another part that’s easy to overlook.
Entering an award makes you articulate why the work mattered. It forces you to step out of delivery mode and look back at the journey: the problem you started with, the thinking behind the solution and the difference it made.
Even putting the entry together can remind a team just how much they achieved. And when good work is shared more widely, other communicators get to learn from it too.
It’s also one of the reasons we’re proud to support the comms2point0 UnAwards.
We have a particular soft spot for the UnAwards, too. In 2025, Alive with Ideas and West Berkshire Council won Best Human x AI Collaboration for our work together.
It was lovely to win, obviously.
But it was also an opportunity to pause.
To look at something we’d created together, think about why it worked and recognise the people and thinking that made it possible.
We don’t do that enough.
So, what are you proud of?
Think about the work you’ve done over the past year.
The campaign that landed. The problem you solved. The idea that shouldn’t really have worked but did. The tiny budget you somehow stretched. The result that made you think, yes, we actually did that.
The 2026 comms2point0 UnAwards are open for entries, but not for much longer.
With categories celebrating everything from creativity and collaboration to innovation and impact, there’s an opportunity to put your work and your team in the spotlight.
And the best bit? It’s completely free to enter.
You’ve got till midnight on 29 October, good luck!
