A SIPA member emailed me last week to tell about their success with the awards program they run. (He/she wanted to remain anonymous.) No less than a U.S. senator from Nebraska called the awards program "prestigious" and sent out a special press release congratulating the Nebraska company on its award.

In 2018, the Informa Pharma Intelligence editorial and marketing teams collaborated on the release of its annual white paper analyzing the evolution of pharma R&D for the past year. But this wasn't your typical medical or scientific report. It was more music to their audience's ears.

With the opening of the submission period for the 2019 SIPAwards—40 years and counting!—it's a good time to list the 2018 SIPAward winner profiles that I wrote last year. Here is a rundown of those with brief descriptions and links to the full stories and strategies.

Write content. Right people.

With the 2018 SIPAwards finalists now determined and listed on our site—a record 93 in all!—it's a good time to take one more rear-view glance at last year's winners and some of the lessons that emerged from them.

"This data-driven story was the result of a five-month effort tracking the political contributions made by senior executives at 39 private equity (PE) firms. The goal was to create an interactive database that would allow our readers to analyze how candidates' voting records and public positions on issues such as financial industry regulation influence campaign contributions from PE professionals."

When asked about whether to hire a photographer for a recent event, I responded, "Yes, by all means, people love good photos." But I had a caveat: "We have to make strong use of them." Too often I've seen valuable initiatives—photos, articles, websites—crafted excellently but then not get pointed to enough.

Although I covered Chesapeake Family Life's successful foray into Facebook Live about a year ago, it was before it won a 2017 third-place SIPAward for Best Use of Video and more details were presented. So let's go through CEO Donna Jefferson's process again to see how it can be a template for other publishers.

When you see numbers like a "1,000% increase in conversions from prospects to subscribers over the previous year" and a "27.27% trial-to-sale conversion rate," you take notice. So let's see what led to these amazing numbers for Argosy Group's Regulatory Compliance Watch Webinars in 2016—a campaign that earned the Simplify Compliance business unit a Third Place 2017 SIPAward for Best Lead Generation Program.

There are so many things to like about the launch by Argosy Group—a Simplify Compliance company—last year of their new Regulatory Compliance Watch website. They responded to customer feedback. They told their audience in both a letter and flyer that the new site was on the way. They listed seven challenges that had to be overcome. And then went in-depth on the solutions.