Great Northern Wedding Awards – How they work

By popular demand, the Great Northern Wedding Awards are back! We are always inundated with questions of when they might come back after we rested them in 2020 and feel that the time is now right to return. Not only are the Awards returning but our entire voting process has been scrutinised, updated and improved, making it much fairer on every business regardless of size and numbers. ENTER HERE

Our main changes are:

  • Businesses must enter themselves, so no more nominations.
  • Businesses must pay to enter, however it costs just £40 + VAT to enter stage one voting, and there is no cost if you proceed to the stage two voting process.
  • At the end of stage one and stage two voting processes your votes are counted, then an average score is calculated, making it fairer for businesses who have less weddings each year.
  • We will have a judging panel who will oversee all votes, scores and any other supporting information.

Our entry fee for businesses to enter the Great Northern Wedding Awards is just £40 + VAT. No more nominations – you decide yourselves if you wish to enter our Awards. Stage one voting for couples opens on Monday 16th October. You can enter the Awards at any point between today and the date of stage one vote closing, which is Monday 8th January 2024. At the end of stage one, the top five businesses in every sector will move onto stage two of the voting process, which we call our ‘Final Fives’. Stage two voting opens no later than Friday 12th January 2024, and then stage two voting closes no later than Friday 15th March 2024. Winners will be announced in April 2024. Our previous Awards Ceremonies have taken place during a mid-week afternoon, with a great lunch provided and a ticket price of approximately £30 + VAT per person.

Our voting process is based around five individual attributes, each of the five being important attributes to any business and these are: Approachability/Friendliness; Communication; Ease of Booking Process; On the Day Quality; Value for Money

Your voting couples will then position these five attributes in order of importance to them, and the order in which they position these five attributes will create an overall score. We then divide this score by the number of votes, and it’s this average score that introduces an additional layer of fairness – it doesn’t matter if you’ve done 50 weddings a year or 500, we are looking for an average score.

We also have a judging panel of at least three independent wedding professionals with a minimum of 10 years weddings experience.  Having a judging panel will also add a further layer of fairness to our whole voting system. This panel will read any supporting evidence submitted by voting couples, and also any information provided by the business will be considered during the final voting verification process.

One vote per person only, so that’s two votes for every couple, and all duplicate votes will be removed. ENTER HERE