How do you use an awards scheme to engage your stakeholders?

The online community 2degrees is all about engagement.

For the past six years it has been helping companies large and small solve their sustainability challenges by facilitating peer-to-peer collaboration via its online platform. Today, it is the world’s largest community for sustainable business professionals, with more than 35,000 members.

And of these members, many use the community to engage and influence their stakeholders – whether through the plethora of forum threads and blog posts, or via webinars and feature articles.

And when it launched its awards and recognition scheme, it was keen to keep this core 2degrees reason-for-being centre of mind – to create a sustainability awards scheme like no other, one that its members could use as a key component of their stakeholder engagement efforts.

And that’s exactly what happened.

Now in its second year, 2degrees is once again calling for organisations and individuals with inspiring examples of sustainable business practice to shout about their success stories by entering this year’s 2degrees Champions Awards.

As the only sustainable business awards voted for entirely by industry peers, the 2degrees Champions Awards offer recognition to those using innovation to push the boundaries of environmental, economic and social sustainability.

Last year’s winners included a range of start-ups, SMEs and FTSE-listed businesses including Unilever, The Co-operative Group, Sky, O2 and SC Johnson.

Last year’s Sustainability Champion of the Year, Sky’s Daniella Vega, described the Awards as being "in many ways, a lot more powerful and humbling than being selected by a group of judges  - there’s something very healthy about being scrutinized by your peers”.

What makes the 2degrees Awards different to other awards schemes is its use as an effective stakeholder engagement tool. And not just for those that win, but for all those that enter too.

From encouraging your staff to vote for you, to bringing your commercial teams to the Awards ceremony itself, as was the case with winning business O2. “The 2degrees Champions Awards are actually an engagement tool in their own right,” said O2’s Katie Hyson. “Even if you’re not a winner, the Awards give you a great opportunity to drive enthusiasm and interest in that particular project.”

The 2degrees Champions Awards are a recognition and reward scheme like no other in that – from a stakeholder engagement stance, at least – it creates many winners before a vote has even been counted.

Entries for the 2degrees Champions Awards are open until midnight on 14 February 14 2014.

To find out more and enter click here