Announcing the 2023 Acquia Engage Awards

July 13, 2023 7 minute read

Celebrate your digital excellence with us and submit your nomination by August 21, 2023!

Every year, Acquia celebrates the most aspirational digital solutions from our customers and partners during the annual Acquia Engage Awards. In 2022, we were impressed with how 56 brands implemented high levels of innovation, creativity, and dedication to create their digital solutions. This year, we want to honor organizations that have gone above and beyond to imagine, build, and deliver the most ambitious digital experiences.

We’ve added a couple of new categories to the 2023 Engage Awards to highlight the exceptional ways businesses and cross-functional teams rose to reinvent the customer experience while adding value to the brand. Read on for tips and best practices that result in a winning nomination and download our preparation doc to help you and your team fill out the submission form together.

So, what are you waiting for? It’s time to share your innovative digital projects and celebrate your success with us! Nominations will be open until August 21, 2023.

2023 categories and criteria

A panel of distinguished judges composed of digital experience platform (DXP) and digital marketing experts will evaluate submissions based on several criteria: functionality, integration, performance (results and key performance indicators), and overall user experience. All submissions must represent initiatives, updated features, or projects built with Acquia that were completed during 2022 or 2023.

Best Experience at Scale: Scaling to accommodate online growth is tough! It may require a change in technologies, delivery models, or the way organizations do business. Show us how you rose to the challenge and delivered amazing solutions at scale.

Best Data-Driven Customer Experience: When you drilled down into your customer data using Acquia CDP, did you find something that caused you to shift how your organization does business? Tell us how your customer insights and/or analytics changed the game for your team or org.

Best Return on Investment: Tell us how you have implemented strategies that speed time to market, improve customer engagement, or drive better outcomes for your business.

Best Use of Digital Asset Management: Let us know how you have empowered your brand to have the greatest reach across business functions and supporting channels using Acquia DAM. The winner will have the most impactful use case, and most integrated brand activation and elevation.

Best Use of Technology to Drive Accessible Outcomes: Show us how you are meeting website accessibility standards to create digital experiences that are accessible to all customers, citizens, students, and/or employees.

Excellence in Governance: This will showcase the brands that have used technology to support regulatory compliance and/or infosecurity objectives.

Leader of the Pack: We want to hear from organizations that are setting the bar for digital experiences in their field or industry. We’re celebrating leaders in: Financial Services, Health, Higher Education, Life Sciences, Manufacturing and Utilities, Media and Entertainment, NGO or Non-Profit, Public Sector, Retail and Commerce, Technology, and Travel and Transportation.

Most Impactful Fusion Team Experience: How has your team created flexible, open solutions that improve or even reinvent customer experience? Share your stories on how you’ve brought cross-functional teams together to add value to the brand experiences.

Most Impactful Headless Application: Customers should have a coherent and consistent brand experience across devices and channels. Tell us how your team has created an omnichannel customer experience leveraging Drupal in a hybrid or headless environment.

Most Impactful Tech Stack Integration: We prize openness so that users can implement Acquia products alongside other favorites to meet specific business needs. Tell us how you are using our solutions with customer data, content, analytics, and other products from other vendors — or even your own home-grown solutions.

Quickest to Launch: Got things up and running at top speed in no time? We want to know how your team expertly leveraged Acquia to bring your solution from vision to fruition, fast.

Best practices for a winning Acquia Engage Award submission

Follow these tips and improve your chances for victory in 2023.

Tell your story and speak to the criteria. Do your best storytelling, but be mindful of the category criteria. Some award categories can be very competitive, and a brilliantly written nomination that ignores part of the criteria may miss the mark.

Share the “before state.” Give the judges a clear sense of what life was like before your project got launched. What went well and what was missing? What did you hope to achieve?

Align to your strategy. Share the context that correlates to organizational objectives and how your project’s success also supports organizational success.

Share numbers and speak to the greater impact. Numbers don’t lie. Measurement wins the day. Give evidence that your project achieved the stated goals.

Back it up with visuals. Supplement your submission by sharing links, videos, screenshots, or charts. Offering a direct look into the project will help the judges visualize your progress, see the before state, and experience what you offer today.

Share lessons learned. Acquia Engage is all about sharing best practices, so take the opportunity to pass on what you've learned throughout the project.

Collaborate with your team. Don’t forget, you can make it easier for your team to draft, edit, and collaborate on your nomination with the 2023 Submission Preparation Document.

Take a cue from past winners. Want to know what captivated the judges in the past so you too can craft a winning submission? Check out these stories from last year’s Engage Awards winners, who detailed how their projects began, the problems they were trying to solve for, and the measurable results they saw, like increases in user satisfaction, web visitors, revenue, digital sales, and more.