communication department

By Beau Cain, Manager, Pacesetter Award Committee

After a year’s absence from STC’s awards and recognitions scene, the Pacesetter Award is ready to make its second début. The new Pacesetter Award still recognizes the successful implementation of innovative operations in chapters and SIGs, but it’s significantly different from its original incarnation in the following ways:

1. Communities can apply for the new Pacesetter Award instead of relying on a director to recommend them.
2. Communities win the award not just by successfully implementing an innovation, but by documenting it so it can be shared by other communities.

These two changes mean that the annual distribution of the award is no longer limited by geography. Any community anywhere—geographic or online—can apply for the award each year. It also means that communities applying for the award must describe both the benefits that the innovation produced and the procedure that the community used to implement it. Sharing that information makes the innovation useful to other communities.

Why Apply for a Pacesetter Award?

Communities should apply for a Pacesetter Award so that they might earn official recognition from STC, of course. Winning a new Pacesetter Award shows others that your community not only successfully implemented an innovative operation, but was also the first to officially describe its procedures and benefits.

STC values innovation at the community level, because it is at the community level that most members interact with STC. The better our communities operate, the better our members’ STC experience can be. Innovation will always be necessary to meet the challenges of delivering value to members.

From Implementation to Database

Applying for the new Pacesetter Award will be the method for sharing your community’s successfully implemented innovations with other communities so that they might improve their operations, too.

There are four stages for making your community’s innovations sharable with other communities:

1. Your community successfully implements the innovation
2. Your community submits an eligible application
3. Your community wins a Pacesetter Award
4. STC publishes the innovation in the Pacesetter Award database

Award-winning innovations will be collected in a database that will be available for STC communities to peruse. This database of award-winning innovations will help community leaders find proven procedures of innovative operations and the specific benefits they produced. It will also serve to advise community leaders about what innovations STC already recognized with a Pacesetter Award.

How to Apply

If your community is interested in participating in the new Pacesetter Award program, begin by reading the Pacesetter Award Guidelines that will be posted shortly on the STC Web site. Follow the instructions, including the instruction to contact the Pacesetter Award Committee to ask questions or to let them know your intention to apply. Please watch for specific details about the spring 2008 deadline.

Your community’s innovation, properly documented and submitted, could earn STC recognition and help other communities deliver value to STC’s members.