(Illustration by Jim Frasier.)

His father, the late Rudy Bruner, immigrated to the United States from Romania in 1922, prospered as an inventor and steel-processing entrepreneur, and started a family foundation that Bruner now runs. Since 1987, the foundation has given the Rudy Bruner Awards for Urban Excellence to five recipients—one gold medal winner and four silver medal winners—every other year. The elder Bruner began talking about evaluating the performance of the nonprofits he funded in the 1970s, two decades before the idea of venture philanthropy came into vogue. The son developed an idea to evaluate buildings in a similar way to honor his late father. "The intention is to use the prize as a bully pulpit to advance the idea that architecture is more than just the design," Bruner explains. "I wanted to offer prizes to architectural structures that could prove their value not just in terms of form, but as an object with social and economic impact."

Because Bruner is a full-time architect with his firm, Bruner/Cott in Cambridge, Mass., he derives a great deal of inspiration from seeing the works of his prizewinners. However, from the inception of the award, when he sketched out the idea at an Irish pub in New York with a group of environmental designers, Bruner knew that he would have to be hands-off when it came to picking the winners.

The foundation awards the prizes to a building or complex, although the entrant can be the owner, the architect or even a city. The entrant also must submit a plan for using the prize money—gold medal winners receive $50,000 and each of the silver medal winners get $10,000, but the money must go back into the project. Bruner assembles a committee of accomplished experts to judge the submissions and give the prize the credibility that makes it worthwhile, he explains. For each two-year round, Bruner and Emily Axelrod, a city planner who is the director of the family foundation and the award program, assemble a group of six judges. The team always includes a mayor (Manuel Diaz, the mayor of Miami, held this position in 2007), as well as at least one architect or urban designer, a community activist and a financial administrator.

"Among them, they are aware of whole sets of problems a building might address that I’d never understand as an architect," Bruner says. He travels whenever he can with the selection committee members, who spend three days examining the sites they select as finalists. Other architectural design awards may go to buildings that the judges have examined only in photographs, but Bruner insists that his foundation does not scrimp on a travel budget, which runs around $200,000 for every two-year cycle.

Superfluity of Swag
Creating a prize with one’s name on it is not an easy route to immortality. The world is awash in prizes; globally, it is a $2 billion "industry" with private or public philanthropies bestowing some 30,000 awards every year. American philanthropists currently give more than 5,000 major prizes, with 90 percent of these created in the past 20 years, according to Larry Tise, who runs the International Congress of Distinguished Awards (ICDA) in Philadelphia, an organization he founded in 1994 to advise prize donors and establish standards for the field. But few U.S.-based prizes have risen to the level of the most sought-after international honors, including the Nobel Prize and the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest prize for literature. These awards have served as great inspiration for entire generations of Americans, says Tise, who has noticed that the growth in the number of prizes correlates with the overall rise of wealth in this country. Tise sees that many individuals who put aside youthful ambitions to make money are now in a position where they can rub shoulders with some of the world’s most accomplished astronauts, biologists and performers by providing the funds for a prize.

TOP VIEW If You’ve Ever thought of discovering your own American Idol—of art, science, letters, human-itarian works or even showmanship—you could do a lot worse than look-ing to Alfred Nobel for inspiration. Philanthropists love giving prizes as much as recipients love getting them, but setting up a serious prize program takes full-time dedication and diligent planning. And, like everything else, it requires on target marketing.

Providing the capital for the awards and prizes is the easy part. More often, these programs fall short of the impact they could have when it comes to such goals as promoting the careers of promising individuals or encouraging research or creativity in a certain area, Tise says. He found his spark to start ICDA at a meeting of 12 award directors at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1991; he was director of the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, which oversees the oldest science and technology awards program in the United States. The attendees decided they needed to provide more detailed direction for award-giving, improve standards and gather a body of knowledge about the field. "It was a eureka moment," Tise says. The directors realized that everyone who tries to start an award program faces virtually the same issues, so he decided to start his organization as a continuing forum. Since 2004, he has offered a training and certification program for administrators of award programs.

According to ICDA’s primary dictums, Bruner has done things properly. He has had to make some adaptations along the way, but his plan takes into account the most important agenda item: the selection process. A good awards program always has an external selection committee. "Without that, an awards program is flirting with disaster by being a self-promotion program," Tise says. "This is the biggest no-no of all." Tise frequently encounters donors who come up with an idea for an award with a recipient already in mind. In a recurring scenario, a donor will approach a university faculty member who is an expert in a field and ask for recommendations for a recipient. The faculty member will then suggest a name that may be worthy of recognition, but is appointed by a committee of one—with no vetting, peer review or cross-examination of personal and professional ties. "The more distance there is between the nominations and selection process and the donor, the more likely the prize is going to be recognized as having great stature and conferring honor," Tise says.

Few U.S.-based prizes have risen to the level of the most sought-after international honors, including the Nobel Prize and the Prix Goncourt.

If Your Name Isn’t Oscar
Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, entrepreneur, author and pacifist, died in 1896 with a will decreeing (against the wishes of his family) that the bulk of his wealth be used to give prizes to those who have done their best for humanity in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. (The Bank of Sweden added a Nobel Prize in economics in 1969.) Yet Tise says it was largely the Peace Prize, first awarded to the founders of the Red Cross in 1901, that made Nobel and his honors a household name during a time when the world was going through, in rapid succession, the Spanish-American War, the Russo-Japanese War and then two world wars. Likewise, controversial winners such as Theodore Roosevelt and corecipients Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho—who declined the award in 1973, citing the fact that there was no peace in his country as the Vietnam War raged—helped generate buzz and created more awareness.

A high-profile name is a crucial component of an award, not because it boosts egos but because it lends weight to the cause.

A high-profile name is indeed a crucial component of an award, not because it boosts egos (which it does), but because it lends weight to the cause. Bruner, who is still on the lookout for greater publicity, says spreading the word leads to "people demanding more of what we do," referring to his foundation’s recognition of architecture that makes excellent use of restored spaces. A marketing niche helps as well. Tise notes that the Pulitzer Prize receives attention because it is awarded to journalists and publicized by their employers. "It’s the only set of awards that has its own PR mechanism built in," he says.

The MacArthur awards hit what Tise refers to as a marketing home run; the term "genius grant" is often applied to the MacArthur Foundation’s $500,000 prizes bestowed to individuals of "exceptional merit and promise as an investment in their continued work." The world is always curious about geniuses, but unfortunately for new prize donors, this particular term is already taken.

Even a seven-figure award does not guarantee attention. Consider the stumbling blocks that Steven M. Hilton, chairman, president and CEO of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, has encountered in bestowing the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize, an annual award that presents $1.5 million to an organization that significantly alleviates human suffering. In 1996, when the foundation held its first awards dinner for the presentation of the prize to Operation Smile, it was difficult to get people to attend, Hilton says. "We just used the contacts we had within our own family and foundation, so there wasn’t a very large list of people we could invite." He was able to resolve that problem two years later by changing the venue for presenting the award; instead of a dinner, the foundation now organizes an entire conference for individuals working in the humanitarian field. "That has really helped gather a critical mass of people to make the event really special," he says.

Bruner, too, says that when he launched his award he had no idea how difficult it would be to spread the word to potential contestants. He found the first year particularly challenging because the mainstream media would not run pieces announcing that the award existed—and he did not have the budget for an advertising campaign. Instead, Bruner and the foundation’s staff sent mailings to professionals working in urban planning and architecture.

Originally, Bruner thought the prize would go to just one winner every two years, but he soon realized that giving five awards was a way to garner more publicity. "It gives us more to talk about," he says. It also gives the media in every recipient city a potential story, and local news coverage has turned out to be an excellent way to continue raising the profile of the Rudy Bruner Awards.

Parroting Pulitzer
The world is filled with artists, scientists and humanitarians looking for free money, but Tise says there can also be too many philanthropists giving out awards that are simply replicas of better-known accolades. "The typical instinct of a philanthropist is to say, ‘I’d like to create a Nobel Prize,’" he says. Genetics is one field that he notes is crowded with prizes; the American Genomic Society has offered awards since 1920, so a philanthropist planning another such prize must hone his very carefully. A benefactor who emulates a well-known award risks digging himself a hole out of which he’ll never climb. No one was giving peace prizes when Nobel wrote his will; altruists should choose a field that’s not already dominated by a high-profile competitor.

Alternatively, a philanthropist may hope to eventually create a feeder to even the Nobels. When Albert and Mary Lasker started the Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards in 1945, their goal was to help cure disease and raise awareness of the value of biomedical research. Today, there are many similar prizes in existence, but the Lasker awards hold a special cachet: 71 Lasker laureates have gone on to receive Nobel prizes, most within two years of winning a Lasker.

Darlene M. Siska is a writer based in Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.