How to Enter

General tips and summary of categories

Your entry should clearly state why your council deserves to win above all others. Judges will take into account the council's budget and local circumstances to ensure achievements can be recognised regardless of size. External performance certificates and indicators, such as Investors in People or ISO 14001, may also be taken into account.

It is important your entry is concise and to the point, so please try to keep to the suggested word length if possible. We strive to keep questions brief to save entrants time and resources.

Any additional information you provide should also be succinct, clear and relevant. Please try not to swamp the judges with excessive detail. Shortlisted entrants will have an opportunity to meet judges in person and can give further evidence and answer any queries at that stage.

It is worth considering allowing someone who is not familiar with your work to review your entry to ensure it is readable and convincing.

Your entry will be treated confidentially if you wish, but bear in mind the executive summary in each category may be used in awards publicity and LGC publications.

In all categories our judges will be looking for evidence of:

• Your principal achievements, or milestones reached as part of an ongoing project, delivered between October 2011 and September 2012
• Performance exceeding expectations
• Success measured through benchmarking exercises, customer surveys, comparative figures, etc
• Improvement against past performance and/or sustained excellence over time
• Ambition and innovation
• How your success meets local needs and how this might be replicated elsewhere 
• Where appropriate, the potential for continued success and sustained organisational change
• Value for money, considering the need to make significant savings (this does not necessarily mean delivering services for the lowest cost)
• How initiatives contribute to the council's overall strategy and objectives
• Endorsement from staff, service users and outside partners (such as business leaders and health partners)

Online entry form:

In order to complete your entry please fill out all of the boxes on the form below and press the submit button at the bottom.

Answers must be submitted using the boxes on the form and not attached as a separate document. However, in order to prevent any problems that may be caused by conflicts with your operating system or the form timing out, we would recommend that you compile your entry in word and then copy it over to the form.

If you wish to save your entry without submitting it so you can come back and amend it this can be done by clicking the save button.