Ethics and confidentiality

In our role as award entry writers, we are put in a position of trust by both our clients and awards organisers. Our clients need to know we will not mishandle their confidential information or misrepresent them, and awards organisers need to know that we will not try and mislead the judges. For this reason, we work to a strict code of conduct.

Conflict of interest

Honesty in submissions

When we write awards submissions our aim is to do you justice and help find the evidence needed to substantiate your claims. We do not endorse or encourage exaggeration or fabrication.

Being honest about your chances

We are not the judges, so cannot predict with certainty what will get through to the finals or win. We will, however, use our extensive experience to give you an honest assessment of your chances. For example, if our search for evidence to prove you are outstanding fails to uncover anything that might earn you a place in the finals, then we might possibly recommend pulling the plug on the submission. This does not mean we won’t charge for time already invested, but it does mean saving time, money and disappointment in the long run.

Confidentiality

We regularly sign non-disclosure agreements and are always happy to do so. Whether we sign one or not, we will treat all information provided as confidential and will not share it outside the Boost team. We will also not publish the fact that we work with you on our website or in marketing communications of any sort without your permission.

We believe a client should take all the credit and where possible keep our involvement in the writing of an award submission under wraps. Please see our Privacy Policy for more details.

Honesty in charging

When a quote or upper limit is agreed for a project, we will only charge up to this point.

Independence

Boost will not accept any commission from awards organisers for encouraging people to enter their awards. We also do not own or part-own any awards programmes.

Personal honours and King’s honours

We do not ever help individuals self-nominate for honours like MBEs, CBEs, Peerages etc. These honours do not welcome self-nomination, so from an ethical standpoint, we have chosen not to be involved in any way with such activity. The Cabinet Office specifically states that it ‘does not endorse the use of fee-charging drafting services’. We therefore respect this.

An honest win rate

The good news is that we are so successful that we do not need to fiddle our figures to make us look more successful than we really are.

As the first award entry specialists, rather than PR specialists or journalists who dabble in awards, we have mastered techniques that are unique to Boost and that dramatically increase the likelihood of our clients winning credible awards (which often have 30-100 applications per category), and almost 40% of our submissions win.

Our win rate is calculated by dividing the number of genuine third-party awards won by the number of entries we wrote or co-wrote for clients (across the entire time we have been trading).

We do not employ any of the following tactics (that we have seen amongst less reputable marketing and PR service providers) to make them appear more successful when it comes to award entry writing:

• Treating commendations as wins.
• We don’t use creative wordplay to make our win rate sound better than it really is.
• Run any type of home-made awards programme where we act as the awarding body as well as the award entry writers – this sounds shocking, but it happens.
• Focus our clients on awards that are easy to win, but lack prestige. Our aim is to add value to their brands, and unknown or “pay-to-win” awards do not achieve this.

Our ESG credentials

As the preferred awards partner for many of the world’s leading organisations – including government agencies and major financial institutions – we’re required to meet the highest ESG standards. However, aligning ourselves to some of the most stringent responsible business standards isn’t a tick-box exercise for us: ‘doing the right thing’ has been Boost’s mantra since our founding in 2006, and is one of our core company values. Consequently, we have one of the most robust and comprehensive ESG strategies in our industry, encompassing the following elements:

Environment  

• Low carbon consultancy: Hybrid working is our default principle, significantly reducing our carbon footprint. Furthermore, our two offices meet our high environmental standards in terms of energy efficiency and recycling. Only local colleagues are required to attend our offices, and their attendance is limited to just one day per week to keep emissions to a minimum while enabling regular periods of face-to-face collaborative working.
• Carbon offsetting: We have been actively engaged in tree-planting initiatives since 2019, initially planting 100 trees in the heart of National Trust woodlands (supporting the Trust’s goal to plant 20 million trees by 2030), and we are currently in partnership with the Woodland Trust.

  Social  

• Investing in our people: we have 18 pay-rolled employees (more than any other awards agency in the world), all of whom benefit from the following:
  • • Job security.
    • Continuous learning and development.
    • Paid leave.
    • A monthly wellbeing allowance, including private medical insurance.

  Investing in a pay-rolled team not only ensures consistent, high-quality service (our team have eight years of awards consultancy experience on average, while some of our clients have had the same account manager for two decades), but also means that we adhere to clients’ non-disclosure agreements (which typically preclude the use of subcontractors).

• Setting industry standards: We are leaders in ethics within the awards community, having founded the Awards Trust Mark accreditation as well as creating the industry’s first code of conduct.  
• Community support: We sponsor grass-roots sports teams and have raised many thousands of pounds for local charities, in particular for Chestnut Tree House Children’s hospice. We also provide our services at a discount for charities/non-profit organisations.  

  Governance  

• Data security: Our clients entrust us with highly sensitive and confidential data – a responsibility we don’t take lightly. Our robust data protection protocols mean we’re the only UK awards consultancy to have earned Cybersecurity Essentials accreditation.
• Quality assurance: Every award submission goes through a two-stage quality assurance process, and every project is assigned to at least three team members.  
• External oversight: Our approach to people management is externally governed.  
• Code of conduct: While we do not operate in a regulated sector, we’ve nevertheless chosen to create and uphold a strict code of conduct. For example, we don’t write competing entries, and we are always honest about clients’ chances of winning. We also refuse to list, or enter clients into, ‘vanity’ or ‘pay-to-win’ schemes. Despite this, we still have the highest number of wins in our industry. 
• Transparency: We do not manipulate or misrepresent our awards win rate, and are proud to have the most transparent win reporting in our industry, with our full (anonymised) win log available on request. 

Read our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy
Please visit our UK Awards List website to browse our database of 5,000+ UK and International Awards.