Impact Award Submission Errors That Cost You

The FIRST Impact Award (formerly Chairman's) is the most prestigious award in FIRST, and teams lose it to preventable errors before judges even read the content. Know the exact specs.

The real limits (2026 cycle, per the Submitted Awards page):

• Essay: 10,000 characters including spaces and punctuation.
• Executive summaries: 13 questions. The first 12 are each limited to 500 characters including spaces and punctuation; the 13th question is optional and limited to 250 characters.
• Video: optional, 1-3 minutes long (no shorter than 1 minute, no longer than 3), 16:9 widescreen, hosted on Dropbox, Box, or Google Drive and made public to allow downloads. English closed captions are encouraged.
• 2026 deadline: Thursday, February 12, 2026 at 3:00 PM ET.

Mistake 1: Writing to a word count, not a character count. Students draft 500 words and get cut off. Fix: write directly in a character-counting tool and treat 500 characters as a hard ceiling for each executive summary — that's roughly 75-85 words, very tight. Edit ruthlessly: lead with the impact, cut adjectives.

Mistake 2: Video spec violations. Submitting a 4-minute video, a vertical video, or a Google Drive link that isn't set to allow downloads. Fix: confirm 1-3 minutes, 16:9, hosting on Dropbox/Box/Google Drive, and that the share setting is public with downloads enabled — then test the link in an incognito window before submitting.

Mistake 3: Portal/browser failures at the deadline. FIRST warns that Internet Explorer and Safari can cause run-time and redirect errors, and that mobile devices and tablets may not register button clicks or save information correctly. Fix: submit from a desktop using Chrome or Firefox. Confirm the Student Award Submitter has been officially designated by the Lead Coach 1 or 2 and is submitting from their own student account.

Mistake 4: Submitting at 2:59 PM ET on deadline day. The portal and your internet will choose that moment to fail. Fix: submit days early.

Mistake 5: Content that lists activities instead of showing impact. Judges want measurable impact and role-model behavior, not a calendar of events. Fix: for each initiative, state what you did, the number reached, and the outcome — 'taught 200 students; 3 started FLL teams' beats 'we did many workshops.' Use real numbers throughout.

Debugging workflow if the portal rejects you: switch to Chrome/Firefox on a desktop, verify you're logged in as the designated student submitter, and re-paste content as plain text (hidden formatting from Word can inflate character counts and break the limit). If a field rejects your text, it's almost always over the character limit including spaces.