CBC New Media staffers Missy Geyer (l to r), Tara Whitfield, John Conway, Lisa Jeffries & Sora Choi at the Raleigh Public Relations Society’s annual awards program, the Sir Walter Raleigh Awards.
Armed with a small budget and a healthy level of competitive spirit, the WRAL.com marketing team has produced the WRAL TechWire “Full Steam Ahead Awards” since 2012, celebrating the best in local tech. The purpose of the Full Steam Ahead Awards is to honor some of the best and brightest tech businesses in the Triangle area and celebrate their successes over the past year, as well as increase awareness of WRAL TechWire within our target audiences.
In 2013, WRAL TechWire launched CBC’s first every “paywall” premium content subscription model and this event gave us an additional opportunity to illustrate additional benefits of subscribing to TechWire, as well as encourage users to take the new subscription model for a test drive with free trial offers that were distributed to event attendees.
Over 800 people cast votes in various train-themed categories in the month leading up to the event and over 120 attendees came out to Full Steam Brewery in downtown Durham on Thursday, Oct. 24, 2013 to find out who the winners would be. By the end of the night, ten individual and five corporate awards were presented, all following an express train team from Subway (stealth mode) to Express. Awards and prizes include engineer caps, whistles and toy trains – all geared to the Full Steam theme.
In July of 2014, WRAL.com’s Tara Whitfield submitted the Full Steam Ahead Awards to the Raleigh Public Relations Society’s annual awards program, the Sir Walter Raleigh Awards, in the category of “More Bang for the Buck: Special Event”. On Tuesday, Sep. 23, WRAL.com’s John Conway, Missy Geyer, Lisa Jeffries and Tara Whitfield gathered with Triangle-area marketing and communications firms for the Awards’ dinner event and cheered Whitfield on as she accepted a category award on the company’s behalf.
“After reading the application for the award that recapped all Lisa and Tara did and to know first-hand just how much their efforts delivered in direct, measurable results – from attendance to new memberships and much more – I can’t believe they executed Full Steam for that amount of money [$550],” said Rick Smith, editor and co-founder of WRAL TechWire.
The Full Steam Ahead Awards will return in early 2015. And perhaps win more awards for creativity and value.
Thanks to CBC NMG’s Lisa Jeffries for this capcom story & photo.
