In past years, CMF has typically kicked off the Gold Mouse Awards project in June. However, we're doing things a little differently this year—both in terms of our evaluation process and our timeframe. Over the coming weeks, we'll give you more details about how we're changing the awards, but for now, we wanted to let congressional staff (and vendors) know that the website evaluations won't begin until Labor Day. That means you have more time—including August recess—to improve your site.

To help you prepare, we'll also be publishing a series of posts on the evaluation criteria we've used in the past, citing examples of award winners from the 112th Congress. Of course, for additional guidance you can always review the full list of winners as well as the complete 112th Congress Gold Mouse Report.