I enjoyed today’s leader from Elliott Chase on industry awards, and thoroughly agree with many of his points. The BIFM largely sees the BIFM Awards as a money-making venture and does little to promote the awards beyond the awards evening. Although they are getting better. For the first time last year, a 200-word description of each winner was featured on the BIFM website which at least gives people more information about why they won and what can be learned from that organisation or individual’s experience. They did discuss doing a winners’ brochure which would be handed out on the evening and have ‘what you can learn from the winners’ info in it. PFM does promote the shortlisted companies extensively, and does good write-ups afterwards. But more could be done to bring some of this best practice into the sector. And the RICS case studies are good, but not promoted enough.
There are good examples of this happening, but it’s largely the organisations themselves which invest in the PR to make this happen. When Magenta was commissioned by King’s College to put together an award entry for its PFI review with Bougyues, the BIFM Awards entry (which they won) was accompanied by a PR campaign which included press releases, articles in the FM, engineering, cleaning and catering press, and events. The same with the EMC award entry that we put together which won the EuroFM Partners Across Borders Award this year. We were then taken on to promote what they’d learned, across the FM and service line press in the UK trade press and across Europe. They are also contributing to the next batch of RICS FM case studies. All for a pretty reasonable budget when you think about the results they are achieving. But this relies on organisations with budget, and individuals with the balls and insight to fight for that budget, to get the word out there.
Some sort of central repository of best practice and great ideas would be brilliant. A permanent reference point where top tips, advice and case studies from award winners could be hosted. Could i-FM do that? Certainly there are too many vested interests/apathy/ red tape from the other parties to enable it to happen.
