Nominations for our 2025 judging panel are now closed! Thank you to everyone that submitted a nomination. We are busy reviewing them, and will reach out to all nominees in February to confirm if they've been successfully selected.
Our judging panel is made up of sector experts, including your institution peers and education marketing specialists - be that media providers, creative and media agencies or specialist consultants in the sector. Each year, our panel is made up of both new and experienced judges, to ensure we are providing fair opportunities to those who want to experience time as a Heist judge and guidance from those who have previously supported us. Our priority is to ensure we have a wide representation of experience reviewing and selecting our Heist winners.
What does judging involve? Judging the awards of course requires a level of time commitment. Judges are each assigned 5-6 different categories to judge* and can typically expect to read and score between 40-65 entries during the 6 week online-scoring period between April-May.
Based on feedback from previous judges, we expect you to spend between 15-30 minutesreviewing, scoring and commenting on each entry. With this in mind, it’s important for us to fore-warn you that you could be giving up a total of anything between 20 – 35 hours to the Heist Awards Judging process (plus 1.5 days for a judges dinner and judging day). While we are aware and conscious that the process is time-consuming, we have been assured over our 30+ years of running The Heist Awards that it is an incredibly rewarding experience and a fantastic learning and networking opportunity – which is what helps to make it such a sought-after opportunity amongst the sector.
*We split our online judging panels into smaller teams to ensure a mix of expertise and to make sure that no judges from the sector have any online access to the categories they may have entered.