PR Voice

The Regions Sparkled at this year's PRide Grand Prix

On Thursday night just under 300 people filled the recently renovated Birmingham Town Hall for the PRide Grand Prix.

It’s one of the perks of being President that you get to choose where the PRide Grand Prix is held and being an immensely proud Brummie, it had to come to my home city.  Birmingham is also home to the PRide awards.......this is where it all started! And so the best of the best gathered to find out if they had managed to get a ‘highly commended’ or a ‘win’ out of 11 finalists.

The fact that those gathered in the room were the best out of the 1,436 entries received last year was, for me, reason enough to celebrate.

The regional PR scene is thriving and the standard of entries improves every year. Every gold entry has to go through 3 levels of judging – 2 for the regional competition and then final judging for the national PRide Grand Prix. Knowing how long it takes and the effort needed to complete an award entry, it is crucial that as the CIPR we make sure that we give time and consideration to all the entries.

I oversaw the judging for the Grand Prix – we checked out campaign websites, googled press coverage and made sure that we gave each entry the attention it deserved.

For the PR Consultancy of the Year we debated for more than an hour and a half between Tricker PR – the winner and Midland based Bright Consultancy, who achieved highly commended. Both deserve a mention –I love Tricker PR’s approach to staff development, to their creative process and account development. Still a young company and based in Aberdeen they are really setting a high standard.

Bright too is young, ambitious, focussed, determined and creative in their business development. You can see that it was a tough call to make.

A special mention should also be given to Visit Scotland for their outstanding campaign ‘Winter White’ – which won best overall campaign. I didn’t mean for so many main awards to go north of the border – but the standard set by Scottish consultancies and in house teams was extraordinarily high.

The PRide awards not only enable us to showcase the high standards we have throughout the UK but they also enable us to meet, network and exchange ideas. There was a fantastic atmosphere and ‘buzz’ in Birmingham’s Town Hall on Thursday. Much thanks has to go to our sponsors and the CIPR events team – but also to you. Without the constant support the national and regional PR industry gives us we wouldn’t have such a successful and robust award scheme that is the PRide of many.

Demonstrating Excellence

After another epic journey (36 hours!) I finally made it back from Brazil in one piece - although minus my voice thanks to some tropical bug I picked up on my travels.

So, unfortunately, I had to miss last night's CIPR Excellence Awards - always a high spot in our social calendar and probably made even better by not having to listen to me rabbiting on.

With more than a thousand guests it was our biggest-ever, and I've heard from colleagues what a fantastic evening it was. As always, it was a very real demonstration of the high standards PR practitioners are working to and a great showcase event for the entire PR profession.

Those of you who went will know it was a very good evening in a beautiful new venue, with guests enjoying the sunshine during a drinks reception in the garden outside the marquee. And for those of you, like me, who missed it there's always next year!