Its not a Grammy or a Webby but the statue comes to us from the same folks who carve the gold for the Oscar and the Emmy. I must admit I hadn’t known much about the Telly until I was told a few weeks ago that we won the award due to the awesome work of our PR director at It Is Written who submitted the My Place With Jesus website to the judging panel last fall (I wrote a little about the hard work we put into My Place With Jesus and the role I had the opportunity to play in making it, here - http://yostevo.com/blog/?p=159).
The official Telly website says that the award was established to “honor the very best local, regional, and cable television commercials and programs, as well as the finest video and film productions, and work created for the web”. The Telly offers two tiers of prizes - bronze and silver, silver being the highest honor. Apparently the Telly is somewhat different from other awards in that the applicants aren’t pitted against each other, but rather each winner receives an award based on its own merit. According to stats from Wikipedia the Telly receives approximately 13,000 applicants each year, 7-10% of applicants are awarded the Silver statue and 18-25% or applicants receive the bronze statue. Some of the Telly’s past applicants and winners include Universal Studios, Microsoft, Walt Disney Studios, Sony BMG, PBS, ESPN, and Harpo Studios to name a pretty few.
My Place With Jesus was awarded two Silver Tellys in the categories of “Children” and “Religion/ Spirituality”. Receiving two of these awards for the same project is a first for us at It Is Written. We’ve collected quite a few bronze statues over the years for our exceptional TV programming (browse some of that programming here in our newly designed media browser - http://itiswritten.com/television). In 2006 we won the silver Telly for the first and only time till now, receiving two of them for two of our programs - “Fingerprints of God” and “All These Things”. Check out our listing on the Telly Award website and some of the pics of the awards below.
