As everyone has said, there are lots of really good ways to format your answer for the essay. For the short answers, to maximize our character count last year we wrote a single sentence "zinger" that covered the main idea of our answer, and then we had bulleted lists of things we had done to support the main idea. For us, that was much more effective than writing conventional paragraphs.
I'd be more than happy to send you our submission from last year if you want to look at the formatting, just let me know and I will e-mail it to you. Team 365 has a really great model on their website too, located here:
http://moe365.org/gfx07/chairmans/awardentry.pdf
It's good to have a theme for your entire submission including materials submitted for other awards such as your website and business plan. Looking at the Championship Chairman's teams' websites is a good place to start, but your theme should reflect the character of
your team. Good luck!
