I saw a commitment to recognizing team members’ excellence within mere weeks of my start date. At my first company meeting, I witnessed the Sprout Value Awards—a quarterly recognition ceremony for Sprout team members that go above and beyond with their dedication to innovating and providing superior services to our customers. Because members of the Agency Partner Program are an extension of our team and we truly believe that their success is our success, it was a no-brainer that part of our program would include a recognition component like this. Enter: The Sprout Partner Value Awards. The Partner Value Awards are a way for us to recognize members of Sprout Social’s Agency Partner Program for delivering amazing results for their agencies and for their clients. Last month at Agency Partner Day, our very first winners were awarded in the following categories:
Happy Clients, Happy Partner Award Always Be Growing Award #SproutPartner MVP Social Media Campaign of the Year
Winners were chosen based on performance metrics that supported the spirit of each Value Award through an internal voting committee. Due to our huge partner base and the exemplary work from all, we made sure to recognize a first, second and third place within each award.
Happy Clients, Happy Partner Award
Just as the satisfaction of our agency partners is a core focus for #TeamSprout, ensuring client happiness is mission-critical for our agency partners. At Agency Partner Day, we talked about going above and beyond, about offering concierge services and about providing our clients with proactive and consultative services to meet the needs they may not know they have. Our Happy Clients, Happy Partner Award recognizes agencies who do just that. Measured by health scores, social media profile growth and overall usage of the app by customers and clients, this award is a representation of partners who actively engage and encourage participation by their clients. Our winner, SocialCompass, has provided amazing client service since their inception, starting with client education events centered around social media fundamentals and a philosophy that it’s better to teach and enable clients to make better decisions than to be a gatekeeper and barrier to sound social media strategies. 1st Place – SocialCompass 2nd Place – Lever Interactive 3rd Place – Voce — Jared DiVincent (@JaredDiVincent) October 18, 2017
Always Be Growing Award
We know that all of our partners have different goals and ways of measuring their agencies’ success. While some are looking to build their clientele, other agencies are focusing on developing deeper relationships with their current client base. Others yet have a stronger emphasis on building and developing their team. And some partners are just doing it all For this program, it’s important to us that how we support partner growth aligns with an agency partner’s goals. Our partners have unique access to the platform and can grant access to more users at scale. When our winner joined the program, they leaned into the new model in a big way, enabling and empowering their own team and their clients to actively use the platform with a growth from under 10 users to over 75 in just a few months. With a laser focus on growth and leveraging Sprout resources to power the growth of their social media offering, our winner of the 2017 Always be Growing Award is Cosmitto Digital. 1st Place: Cosmitto Digital 2nd Place: Klobo Media 3rd Place: Scofield Digital Storytelling
#SproutPartner MVP Award
Everything’s better with a partner. You hear that from us a lot. It’s a philosophy that our Agency Partner Program was built on. You only have to check out the #SproutPartner conversation on Twitter to see the powerful knowledge sharing happening within our partner community. The #SproutPartner MVP Award recognizes an agency who represents the best of our partner community and social excellence. Whether it’s being an active participant in our bi-weekly partner calls, collaborating with other partners on valuable thought leadership content or sharing their peers’ content across social media platforms—our partners are supportive of each other. So glad to be part of the #SproutPartner fam and to have joined you all last week. #SproutPartnerDay pic.twitter.com/JizbsKHOqu — Krista Whitley (@SocialKrista) October 26, 2017 So we can all grow together. And although many of our partners were in the running, it was awesome to be able to award the #SproutPartner MVP award to the very collaborative and engaged Daniel Bailey, of Whiteoaks PR Consultancy. 1st Place: Whiteoaks PR Consultancy 2nd Place: Sarah Best Strategy 3rd Place: B Squared Media — Whiteoaks International (@WhiteoaksPR) October 17, 2017
Social Media Campaign of the Year
It goes without saying that Sprout cares about social media. We get passionate about creative, compelling and effective social campaigns. So when recognizing agencies for their work, how could we not include an award that allowed our partners to strut their social media stuff? We asked them to submit their best social media campaigns for consideration and boy were we blown away. We received campaigns of all different shapes and sizes. Strategies built from both robust and bootstrapped budgets. There were campaigns centered around building a social media presence and campaigns that spanned across a fully integrated marketing strategy. Reading so many use cases of agencies achieving creative, data-driven results on behalf of their clients was inspiring, to say the least. Our first place winner’s campaign stood out. With a limited budget and the task to “make people care” about an important but difficult to articulate client value proposition, the winner’s team not only created compelling content, but effectively built a distribution plan and armed their client’s brand champions with personalized messaging and a Facebook Live Blitz. Winner for the 2017 Social Media Campaign of the Year is Digital Natives Group. 1st Place: Digital Natives Group 2nd Place: Arcane Digital 3rd Place: SSPR
And Partner of the Year Is….
If we haven’t emphasized it enough, the awards above represent core components of making the most of Sprout’s Agency Partner Program—achieving excellence, learning and collaborating with our peers and delivering amazing social media results. So we couldn’t miss out on the opportunity to offer an overall award that recognized agencies who represent the best across all categories. An agency that supports themselves, their clients and each other, while creating some fun and interesting campaigns in the process. A ‘Partner of the Year’, if you will.
So who won?
The award is still up for grabs! It’s only November and the program just launched mid-year, which means it’s still too early to select our Partner of the Year. We’ll be announcing the winner at the end of this year. All of the nominees listed above and all of the partners that are part of the Agency Partner Program are in the running. Best of luck to our entire partner community this year and every year for these annual awards. Here’s to continuing to collaborate and grow together. Interested in learning more about how you can join the Agency Partner Program? Find out more today.
