(01/15/2020)

By Blake Podhajsky, ACI Awards Chair, Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation

It’s that time of year again when we reflect on all the great work we produced the year before. I can only imagine how many sleepless nights you have had wondering what you will be entering into the ACI Awards Contest.

In all seriousness, we have an exciting and improved contest this year. The contest will open within the next several weeks, and once it does you will notice some changes. Several categories have been added, and several have been dropped and/or repurposed.

We are happy to announce we have added two new social media categories: “Best Social Media Presence” and “Best Social Media Campaign.”

We also have restructured our video categories to better reflect the video work ACI members are producing. The new video categories are “Recurring Video Program,” “Video Feature: Hunting and Fishing,” “Video Feature: How-to/Instructional,” “Video Feature: Natural Resource Conservation,” and “Video Feature: Outdoor Recreation.”

To make room for the new video categories, we retired the “Television Series” category as well as the “Video Short” and “Video Long” categories. For a complete list of categories that will be in this year’s contest, please check out the link below.

The Awards Committee and the ACI Board and I have been constantly working throughout the last couple of years to make our contest the best it can be. With the improvements that were made, I am confident in saying that we are one of the premier awards competitions out there!

I want to encourage you to get involved in the awards as an entrant, a judge or as a cheerleader for your communications team in your agency. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me anytime. You can reach me at blake.podhajsky@odwc.ok.gov or at 405-521-4169.

We will be announcing the official contest dates soon so please follow our Facebook page and make sure to check your emails.

I wish you all the best of luck and hope you win an award!