SCBEX awards night to combine ceremony with virtual show
The 23rd annual SCBEX Spirit of Swift Current Business Excellence awards night will continue the success of last year’s virtual event while also returning to an in-person ceremony.
The details of the hybrid event for SCBEX 2021 have been announced by Swift Current & District Chamber of Commerce CEO Karla Wiens.
The awards ceremony on Oct. 29 will be a more intimate celebration with a smaller audience than previously and proceedings will be livestreamed with a virtual preshow to allow the entire community to be part of the celebration of business excellence.
“It was a pretty positive feeling last year, just because celebrating success was necessary during the nightmare that has been this COVID situation for our business community,” she said. “Last year we did a full-on virtual event, which was very successful. We had over 10,0000 people watching the event at various different times, whether that was live the night of or they could watch the video again. So that was great.”
The wider reach of the virtual format was an important benefit of last year’s SCBEX and the business chamber therefore decided to continue with the livestream broadcast.
The awards night will start with a virtual preshow from 5:30 to 7 p.m. on Oct. 29 featuring celebrity cameos and trivia challenge games to put viewers and guests at the in-person ceremony in a celebratory mood before the announcement of the winners.
“We’re all going to be participating in the same games,” she said. “There will be trivia challenges of various kinds, having the audience engagement and having online games that people can be participating in, whether they’re in the Event Centre or on their couch.”
The in-person awards ceremony will take place at the Living Sky Casino Event Centre. Guests will enjoy a plated meal before the start of the formal announcement of the award winners at 7 p.m. It will still be a ticketed event, but in-person attendance will be limited to nominee finalists, sponsors, and business chamber board members and staff.
According to Wiens the regular awards night gala in previous year could accommodate up to 250 people, but this year’s more intimate event will be limited to 150 guests. She is looking forward to being able to make the presentation to winners in person during the awards ceremony.
“It will be nice in the sense that during the virtual event there certainly wasn’t any less emotion, it just wasn’t in person,” she said. “I’m so excited to have that again, being able to physically hand an award and have that initial reaction from the recipients of the Business Excellence Awards. That will be wonderful.”
The SCBEX awards night will be the culmination of a process that already started on July 1, when nominations opened for the eight award categories. The nomination period closed on Aug. 31 and the total nominations received will be similar to last year’s number.
Last year a total of 186 nominations were submitted, and a week before this year’s closing date there were 155 nominations. Wiens was impressed with the nominations already received.
“Some of the heartwarming kudos and thank you’s and recognition is fantastic,” she said. “And for the finalist that will be utilized during the award ceremony, of course. The nominations are coming in and they’re very well written, good quality, well deserving nods to businesses and individuals, for sure.”
She felt there are several reasons for the high number of nominations submitted for the 2021 SCBEX awards.
“Our community as a whole and our business community does an outstanding job and are very supportive of each other,” she said. “Even people competing in the same field are supportive of each other. The last just about two years have been a struggle. That struggle has been real for everyone and its an opportunity to say thank you and recognize, because the message is supporting local in any way, shape or fashion. … We’re focusing our reach or our marketing efforts to promote and remind people to nominate is, and the reach is just expanding all the time. And any opportunity that we can take to celebrate another person’s success should be utilized.”
Another personal highlight for Wiens during the SCBEX awards process will be when she delivers nomination cards to businesses and individuals who were nominated in the different categories.
“That is one of the best days of my year is delivering those nomination cards, because a public thank you like that doesn’t happen very often and it definitely reinforces the importance of what people are doing and how much they appreciate it,” she said.
A selection committee that consists of last year’s award winners will then have the difficult task to review all the nominations and to select the three finalists in each award category.
“I’m so glad that our previous award winners are willing to participate in this process and just to add that separate level of review,” she said. “It’s a huge task, but a fun one. They all had fun in the past, and reading through what was written, I hope they’ll have the same feeling as me that some of the stories and what’s written about some of the accomplishments of some of our businesses and community leaders is amazing.”
The three finalists in each award category will be announced during a livestreamed event scheduled for 7 p.m. on Sept. 16. This will be similar to last year’s announcement, which was also livestreamed, but somewhat different and people will have to watch to see for themselves.
Thereafter it will be the task of Swift Current & District Chamber of Commerce board members to vote individually on the finalists in each award category to determine the winners, which will be revealed on Oct. 29 during the SCBEX awards night.
“It’s a wonderful field of nominees to start with and whittling it down to three in each category is a monumental task, and then choosing from those three is tough as well,” she said. “So it’s always exciting to see and the anticipation I think for the nominees and the finalists is a very fun time of the year.”