Aage Kaun

Aage Kaun is the name given to the nominations process for the Popular Awards for Aparajita every year. This is the award that is open to the public. Anyone can apply to Aparajita through our website, [email protected] according to the categories that are released each year. Additionally, we also add in candidates ourselves - people who have reached out to us before, those who have been personally recommended by trusted sources, those we have come across on social media and seem a good fit, etc. We only nominate women over 18 years of age and with at least 2 years of experience in doing something exemplary.

Nominees can send us their information throughout the year, but we start compiling our database in one go.

A form on our website is live throughout the year. Sometimes we’ll place a popup on the website. Closer to the event, we publish advertisements in the Sanmarg newspaper, put content on social media platforms, do radio spots, billboards and so on. We manually email, call and text our sponsors and people who’ve associated with us in the past. In recent years, we’ve also explored WhatsApp API and are open to automating marketing processes.

Typically, there’s a straightforward Google Form that asks for a candidate’s name, comprehensive contact information, place of residence, years of experience and field of work and more basic information along these lines; usually we also ask for a couple of paragraphs on how they’ve contributed to their fields or why they think they deserve an Aparajita award. A form can be filled by an interested woman, but it can also be filled on behalf of someone; i.e. if I wish to nominate someone I know, I can do that comfortably, provided I fill in their information correctly.

Since we advertise about Aage Kaun on many platforms (the most persistent being newspaper ads and social media) people come across this information in different ways. Interested women filling the form from a link in our Instagram bio, for example, might also send us Instagram/Facebook DMs as a follow-up, asking for more information. People call and e-mail us directly as well. It’s important to have a team on top of communication at all times so we don’t miss a prospective nominee.

Once we have collected all the information of people registering themselves as prospective nominees, we may choose to close Aage Kaun a few months before the event. Think of this as us having received applications for round one. We sort through all the entries and reach out to the most prospective candidates for round two of vetting. We ask them to fill another form that is more comprehensive - this is an insight form and consists of deeper questions that help us understand the candidates better and perform what is essentially a background check. We also cut down and finalise our categories for the awards for that year, based simply on the categories for which we have the most responses - or for those we deem otherwise appropriate.

The insight forms are reviewed once again by our team and we enlist our council to shortlist the ones that resonate with the Sanmarg Aparajita mission the most. This is typically done at a physical pre-event council meet. Here, the standout stories are discussed and scored by the council appropriately in accordance with a special rubric that is set by EY (who are our official tabulators and process advisors). This is a fair and confidential scoring process where each council member casts their own scores in an undisclosed form that is only ever revealed to the team at EY. At the end of this exercise, we typically finalise 3 nominees for every category.

Due to the huge number of applications we get, we only get back to shortlisted nominees about their nomination.

We email and call them and generally stay in close touch with them from this point on. Nominations are declared on the website, on social media and in the Sanmarg newspapers. Once nominees are declared, voting begins.