Award program finder

Third-party recognition earns credibility with buyers and creates independent mentions others can cite, but only some programs do either. This skill finds the programs that fit the company's use cases, screens out the rest, ranks the survivors by estimated notoriety within a budget, and returns a link to enter each one.

Produces a ranked shortlist and a calendar with category, notoriety, cost, deadline, eligibility, evidence, owner and submit link.

Core principle

Enter few programs, chosen well. A handful of credible entries beats a dozen nobody respects, and every entry spends budget, customer goodwill and team time.

Step 1 - Map the company and set the budget

Collect products, use cases, customer segments, regions, stage and the proof available: outcomes, customers who can be named, product milestones. Write each use case in the words buyers use, since award categories are matched on those words.

Get the budget: total entry spend for the cycle, a cap per entry and the most entries the team can handle. If none is given, ask for it. If it stays unanswered, rank without a cutoff and say so.

Step 2 - Discover programs

Search the live web. Award dates, fees and deadlines change every year, and the agent's memory is not a source. Work in four passes and log every query and program considered (references/program-sources-and-search.md):

1. General search, first. Search award keywords built from the company's subject matter expertise, technology, solution, industry and market, across program types such as industry associations, trade publications, analyst recognitions, conferences and customer-voted badges.
2. Who else won. Check which awards competitors, complementary solutions and industry service providers received over the years, on their sites, press pages and announcements.
3. People awards. Find recognitions for employee achievements, such as executive, leader, rising talent and team awards.
4. Business awards. Find awards for the company itself, such as growth, workplace, innovation and regional business awards.

Open each program's own site. Follow leads from one program to related ones, and stop when new searches return nothing new.

Step 3 - Screen, rank and fit to budget

Judge buyer relevance, judging transparency, entry cost, eligibility fit and whether winners are published on a public page (references/program-screening-rubric.md). Score credibility value and citation value separately.

Estimate notoriety from several public signals: website strength, winners who posted about their win, followers of the program's page, years running and independent coverage. Show each signal's value, source and date (references/budget-and-notoriety-ranking.md).

Rank by fit, then notoriety, then cost. Walk down the list and keep a running spend. Programs over the per-entry cap or the total go to a separate "over budget" list with cost and notoriety.

Step 4 - Prepare the entry plan

For each kept program, record the category to enter, whether the entry is company-level or built on one customer deployment, the evidence required, the customer approvals needed and an owner (references/entry-evidence-and-calendar.md).

Step 5 - Give the link to submit

For every program, give the page where the entry is submitted. Open it, confirm it loads and shows the current cycle, and record the date checked. If the entry page cannot be found, give the program's official page and mark the link unverified. Take links only from the program's own site, never from an aggregator or reseller.

Output format

| Rank | Program | Category | Notoriety (tier, score) | Cost | Running spend | Deadline | Submit link | Date checked | Confidence |

Follow it with the over-budget list, the calendar (eligibility, evidence needed, owner), the order to work in, and everything still unverified.

What good looks like

• The tell: the past winners list. If nearly every entrant wins, or winners are mostly paying sponsors, the program lends no credibility, however visible it is.
• The common mistake: ranking by brand name or one number, such as website strength, and ignoring entry mechanics. A famous program with no category that fits the company wastes the entry.
• A good shortlist: every row has a working link, a verified deadline, a cost and an owner, total spend stays within budget, and at least one program the team had not heard of fits a use case better than the obvious ones.

Rules

• MUST stay within the stated budget, and list anything over it separately with its cost.
• MUST verify deadline, cost, eligibility and link on the program's own page, and record the date checked.
• MUST present notoriety as an estimate, with each signal's value, source and date, and mark unreadable signals unverified instead of guessing or scoring them zero.
• MUST flag pay-to-play programs and programs where nearly all entrants win, and never let notoriety outweigh the flag.
• MUST get written approval from any customer or employee before naming them in an entry.
• NEVER guess or construct a submission link, or invent a deadline, fee, follower count or past winner.
• NEVER fill in or submit a form, pay a fee, or enter company data on any site without explicit human approval.
• NEVER ask for anyone's credentials.