How to Nominate Someone for a Local Award

Every year, thousands of people across the UK who deserve recognition for sustained community work do not receive it, not because no award exists for them, but because no one wrote a nomination that did justice to what they had done. The deserving person and the award exist in the same town, and the connection is not made. This is a failure of craft rather than of intention, and it is correctable.

Writing a strong nomination is a skill. It is not a natural one. Most people's instinct when asked to nominate someone they admire is to reach for superlatives: "wonderful", "incredible", "selfless", "tireless". These words feel appropriate but they do not work. They are so general that they apply to almost everyone who has ever been nominated for anything. An assessor reading fifty nominations full of "wonderful" and "selfless" has no way to distinguish between them. The nomination that succeeds is the one that replaces adjectives with evidence.

Understanding the Types of Local Awards

Before writing, it helps to understand what you are writing for, because different awards have different criteria, different assessors, and different expectations of what a strong nomination looks like.

Local council civic honours vary by local authority. Some councils run annual community awards with their own application processes. Others have civic honours distributed by the mayor or deputy leader, sometimes via internal nomination. Contact your council's communications or community engagement team to ask what schemes are currently open. The deadlines are often poorly publicised and many nominations fail simply because they arrived a week late.

High Sheriff awards are distributed by the High Sheriff of each county, a historic appointment that operates independently of the council. High Sheriffs are appointed by the Crown and serve for one year. They typically run an awards programme during their tenure focused on community, voluntary, or public service work in the county. The High Sheriff's office for your area can be found via the High Sheriffs' Association website. The selection criteria vary by High Sheriff, as each incumbent tends to emphasise different themes, so reading about the current High Sheriff's priorities before writing your nomination is worthwhile.

The Points of Light award is given by the Prime Minister to outstanding volunteers and recognises individuals making a significant difference in their communities. These are awarded throughout the year on a rolling basis rather than an annual cycle. Nominations are submitted to Number 10 via an online form and are assessed by a small team. Points of Light awards tend to go to people with a specific, concrete achievement or a long track record, and the most successful nominations are those that combine both: a sustained body of work that includes at least one moment of identifiable impact.

There are also sector-specific awards worth considering: The King's Award for Voluntary Service for groups rather than individuals, NHS volunteering recognition schemes, Arts Council community arts awards, and a range of awards run by charities and foundations in specific fields. If the person you are nominating has a particular area of focus, searching for awards in that field is likely to surface options with better criteria alignment.

Gathering Evidence and Structuring the Narrative

The three things a strong nomination needs are specificity, scale, and story. Specificity means named people, specific dates, concrete outcomes. Scale means some sense of how many people were affected or how long the work has continued. Story means a coherent account of why this person and why this work matter, told in a way that makes the assessor feel the significance rather than just understand it.

Start by making a list of everything the nominee has done. Talk to people who have benefited from their work. Ask them for specific examples and specific quotes. "She helped me get back on my feet after my husband died" is a starting point. "She drove me to my hospital appointments four times in January, helped me apply for Pension Credit, and sat with me when I needed to talk" is evidence. The difference between these two is the difference between a nomination that gets shortlisted and one that does not.

Ask the nominee's colleagues or co-volunteers for information. They will often know details that beneficiaries do not: how many people the nominee has helped, how many years they have been doing it, what specific responsibilities they carry. A food bank coordinator who has been running the Thursday session for seven years, who trained eleven volunteers, and who has developed the referral relationship with the local GP surgery is a more compelling nomination than "a dedicated volunteer at our food bank". The information is the same. The specificity is entirely different.

Structure the nomination with a clear arc. Open with a single vivid example that captures the essence of what the person does. Move to the sustained context: how long, how many people, what the regular commitment looks like. Add the specific impact: what would not exist without them, what has changed because of them. Close with what makes this person distinctive, not what makes them generally good but what makes them this particular kind of good in a way that cannot easily be replicated.

Keep the language clear and direct. Write in plain English. An assessor who finds themselves rereading a sentence to understand what it means is being pulled out of the narrative. Sentences like "Her multifaceted contribution to community engagement manifests across several domains" mean nothing. "She runs the Tuesday lunch club, visits six isolated residents weekly, and organises the annual street party for two hundred people" means everything. Our article on why local heroes rarely call themselves that explores why the people most deserving of recognition are often the hardest to write about compellingly, because they are least likely to have promoted themselves.

Supporting Letters and the Myth of the Automatic Winner

Most award schemes invite or require supporting letters from people other than the nominator. These letters are often treated as a formality. They should not be. A supporting letter from the chair of the local residents' association that says "I wholeheartedly support this nomination" contributes nothing. A supporting letter from a GP who says "I have referred seventeen patients to this volunteer over three years, and in every case the referral produced a better outcome than any clinical intervention I could offer" is material.

When asking people to write supporting letters, give them specific guidance. Tell them what the award criteria are. Tell them what angle you have taken in the main nomination. Ask them to cover a specific aspect of the nominee's work that you have not covered in detail, or to provide a specific example from their direct experience. Two well-constructed supporting letters from people with direct knowledge are more effective than five generic ones from people who admire the nominee at a distance.

The assumption that deserving people win automatically is the most damaging belief in the nomination process. It is not how awards work. Awards are won by the people with the most compelling applications, and the most compelling applications are the ones that have been thought about carefully, constructed with evidence, and written by someone who has taken the time to understand what the assessors are actually looking for. The person doing quiet, sustained, unglamorous work in your community has already done the hard part. The nomination is the last thing standing between them and the recognition they have earned.

If you are not sure which award to aim for, start with your local council scheme and build from there. A council community award can itself be referenced in subsequent nominations for higher-profile schemes, establishing a track record of recognised contribution. And if the person you are thinking of nominating is the kind of person described in our piece on what makes someone a local community hero, you already have the core of your evidence: consistency, reliability, and a community that would notice immediately if they stopped. Our guides section has more on practical community action, including resources relevant to building the kind of documented evidence that strengthens future nominations.