Internal company awards — when they count and when they don't, in my experience

Had a couple of internal, company-specific awards and had to think carefully about whether and how to include them, since they're a genuinely different category of evidence than an external, field-wide award. What I ultimately included, and how: one internal award that had real, documented selectivity (a company-wide process with a clearly competitive, evaluative selection, not just a routine acknowledgment), presented with context explaining exactly how selective and evaluative the process was, since a reviewer wouldn't know that without it being explained. I left out a second, more routine internal recognition that, on reflection, didn't have the same evaluative rigor and would have read as padding rather than genuine evidence. The general principle I used: an internal award can be legitimate evidence if it has real, documented selectivity and evaluative rigor comparable to what the regulation is actually asking for — but the burden of demonstrating that selectivity is higher for an internal award than for a widely-recognized external one, since a reviewer has no independent way to gauge an internal process's real standing without you explaining it.