RESOLVE's Night of HopeCon­grat­u­la­tions on your suc­cess! You are an award-winning recip­i­ent of one of RESOLVE: The National Infer­til­ity Association’s (RESOLVE) Hope Awards for Excel­lence. In the infer­til­ity field, this is equiv­a­lent to win­ning the high­est seal of approval from your peers. Indeed, this is some­thing to acknowl­edge, cel­e­brate and promote.

We have a few sug­ges­tions for how to make the most of this extra­or­di­nary oppor­tu­nity. These ideas range from the sim­ple to the sophis­ti­cated. Some will only take a few min­utes to imple­ment; oth­ers require more thought and exper­tise. So let’s get started.

Web site
Announce your award in the most promi­nent place pos­si­ble on the home page of your organization’s Web site. Also add it to your biog­ra­phy as well as the News sec­tion. Then insert a pho­to­graph or two — RESOLVE will pro­vide pho­tographs of the win­ner with Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Bar­bara Col­lura and voila, you’ve made a sim­ple but sig­nif­i­cant splash in pub­li­ciz­ing this honor.

Email sig­na­ture

Add this to your email sig­na­ture: Recip­i­ent, 2010 Hope Award for ______ from RESOLVE: The National Infer­til­ity Asso­ci­a­tion. Con­sider how many emails you send daily and you’ll be impressed by the impact this sim­ple act can produce.

Busi­ness cards, let­ter­head and brochures

If you have the space, try to add this des­ig­na­tion to your busi­ness cards and/or let­ter­head. If you’re get­ting brochures printed, please be sure to men­tion the award in an appro­pri­ate, highly vis­i­ble space.

Blog post

If you have a blog, con­grat­u­la­tions! Get per­sonal and describe what receiv­ing the Night of Hope award means to you and your work. Also take the time to list and con­grat­u­late the other award win­ners.
Face­book and Twit­ter
Post and tweet about your award. If pos­si­ble, have one of your friends or col­leagues tweet dur­ing the awards cer­e­mony. Also share and re-tweet your fel­low award recipient’s posts. Be a good infer­til­ity col­league, Face­book friend and fel­low IF twitterer.

Video
Lever­age the power of video to tell the story of how you won this award. Get a col­league to video your accep­tance speech and then post it on YouTube or another video upload­ing site. Let your night in the spot­light go viral.

Email blast or mail­ing
It’s always a good idea to com­mu­ni­cate with your refer­ral sources. This is a great oppor­tu­nity to send an email blast or mail­ing to your refer­ral sources and oth­ers on your con­tact list.

Dis­trib­ute a press release

This is where it really gets inter­est­ing. There are many ways you can lever­age press cov­er­age. First, write a press release. RESOLVE will help you by pro­vid­ing a boil­er­plate, swiss cheese for­mat release. All you need to do is fill in the blanks. But also feel free to write a cus­tom ver­sion. Once you com­plete your release, you can post it on your Web site as well as dis­trib­ute it through either a free or paid press release dis­tri­b­u­tion site like www.freepressrelease.com (free) or www.prweb.com (paid).

But if you’re will­ing to go the extra mile or have a mar­ket­ing or pub­lic rela­tions pro­fes­sional who can help, you can also con­tact local or spe­cialty media. This will be news if you can estab­lish a con­nec­tion to a par­tic­u­lar media’s audi­ence: a local news­pa­per, an alumni mag­a­zine, or your home­town radio station.

This award will last a life­time. You’ll always be an award-winning recip­i­ent, but you only will have a finite time spam to take max­i­mum advan­tage of its pub­lic rela­tions potential.