Contact the Awards Secretariat

The secretariat exists to make excellence visible, and that begins with making the process effortless to navigate. Most relationships with entrants follow a recognisable arc, and knowing it helps you use us well. It usually starts with an eligibility or category question — a two-line email asking whether a hybrid agency qualifies, or which of two categories fits a transformation programme. These are answered within one working day, and where the question is genuinely close, it is escalated to the judging operations team so the answer you receive is the answer a panel would give. No question is too early: teams that contact us in June consistently submit stronger entries than teams that first write in September.

The free category check formalises this for anyone who wants it. Send a 200-word summary of the work — what was done, for whom, with what measured result — and within five working days you receive a recommended primary category, alternatives worth considering, and any eligibility notes. The service runs until the early-bird deadline of 31 August and is used by several hundred teams each cycle; entries that used it reach shortlists at a meaningfully higher rate, for the unsurprising reason that mis-categorisation is the most common avoidable error in the field.

During drafting, entrant support handles portal access, co-author invitations, file-format questions and deadline mechanics. What the team cannot do is comment on entry content beyond the advisory review attached to early-bird submissions — fairness requires that no entrant receives drafting help others did not.

After the deadline, communication becomes scheduled and equal. Every entrant receives confirmation of receipt, notice of anonymisation, and the finalists announcement on 26 October — by email before publication, so no team learns its result from a website. Finalists then work with the events team on gala logistics if attending: visas letters for Dubai, delegation registration, ceremony briefings and the closed-door exchange sessions schedule. Winners unable to travel coordinate trophy courier and citation timing through the same channel, and the media team supports announcements at both ends — embargoed materials for your communications office and accreditation for any press you invite.

Within thirty days of results, the written jury feedback arrives, and a quieter but valuable channel opens: clarification questions about the assessment are accepted and answered, appeals — rare — go to the Integrity Board within twenty-one days, and the team is glad to discuss how feedback maps to a re-entry plan for the following cycle. Many of the strongest relationships in the programme’s history began with a finalist’s follow-up call.

Two practical notes close the guide. First, write from an institutional email address where possible — government spam filters quarantine consumer domains in both directions, and the single most common “lost” message each cycle is a portal invitation sitting in quarantine. Second, when a deadline is near, use the subject line prefix URGENT-DEADLINE; during the final week the support queue triages on it across all regional teams, around the clock. Everything else, send as it comes. The secretariat’s standard is simple: every public servant who writes to us is doing work that matters, and the reply should treat it that way.

A genuinely global awards programme cannot run on one time zone, and the secretariat’s regional structure exists so that no entrant’s question waits overnight twice. The Asia-Pacific desk opens the support day, covering entrants from New Zealand through Southeast and South Asia; the Middle East and Africa desks carry the middle hours from the Dubai headquarters, where judging operations and the events team also sit; and the Europe and Americas desks close the cycle, ensuring a question sent from Bogotá or Vancouver at the end of a working day is answered at the start of the sender’s next one. All desks work from the same knowledge base and the same rulings log, so the answer to an eligibility question is identical in every language and longitude — consistency being, for an awards programme, a matter of integrity rather than convenience.

The regional teams also carry local knowledge that pure process cannot: which national honours systems map to which WPSEA categories, how procurement-season workloads collide with entry deadlines in different administrations, where translation support is most often needed, and which countries’ government mail systems are strictest with first-contact email. Entrants are encouraged to mention their country in any first message — routing improves, and so does the answer.

For partners and sponsors, the Dubai partnerships office is the single point of contact, and the conversation begins with the same disclosure every prospective partner receives: sponsorship buys association with the programme and presence at the gala; it buys no visibility of entries, no contact with panels during judging, and no influence on results, ever. Organisations comfortable with that firewall find the partnership genuinely valuable — the gala assembles public-sector leadership from sixty-plus governments — and organisations seeking more than association are respectfully declined. Publishing this in advance saves everyone a meeting.

For media, accreditation for the gala opens in October alongside the finalists announcement, with embargoed winner materials available to accredited outlets on ceremony day. Interview access to jury leadership is arranged year-round for reporting on public-sector excellence, measurement and recognition — subjects the programme actively wants covered well — while requests touching specific entries or unreleased results are declined as a matter of policy.

However your enquiry arrives, it lands with a team whose working assumption is that public service deserves better support than it usually receives. Write, and find out.