The shortlist for the Public Relations Institute of Ireland's (PRII) inaugural Communication Impact Awards will be announced at the end of the month (29 July) as CEO Dr Martina Byrne prepares to step down.

Byrne has led the PR industry body since 2017, and has spent the past six months working to launch the awards since the PRII board officially established them last December.

Taking place in the Winter Garden at the National Gallery of Ireland on 12 September, the PRII Communication Impact Awards have been designed to reflect the current state of the PR industry.

"We wanted to do something different," says Byrne.

"We wanted to design awards very much of the current profession in the sense that we wanted to focus on what’s important to our members and to the people that work for [them].

“What public relations does now is very different to what it did 20-30, maybe even 10 years ago.

"We wanted to design awards where members could talk about real-world, real-life impacts that their work has, whether it’s helping a business to thrive, helping a charity to spread its message, helping a government department to let people know about new services or facilities or whatever.

"We wanted to focus on telling those stories rather than ‘We did this and a squillion people heard about it or saw it.’

"We wanted to take it to the next level and actually join up the dots between why people working in public relations do what they do and how it actually impacts the organisations they work for."

There are 14 categories in all, the winners of which will contest the overall Campaign of the Year award. BusinessPlus.ie parent dmg media Ireland will act as media partner to the awards.

The categories include Most Impactful Communication Campaign, Most Impactful Print/Broadcast Media Campaign, Most Impactful Digital/Social Media Campaign, Best Crisis/Issues Communication Project, Best Internal Communication Project, Best Sponsorship Relationship, and Most Impactful Event.

The Pro of the Year and The Up-and-Coming Pro of the Year recognise professionals working in the field for more and less than seven years, respectively, while the Consultancy Team of the Year and In-House Team of the Year will go to the best external and internal PR teams.

Byrne says that the categories for Best Integrated Communication Campaign for multi-channel campaigns across PR, marketing, advertising, and digital/social marketing, Most Impactful Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Communication Campaign, and Best Application of AI Tools by a Communication Team have proven very popular.

The PRII received more than 140 entries before the deadline for submissions earlier this month, and Byrne is "absolutely delighted with the response" to the call for submissions.

“We just didn’t know [what the response would be]," she says.

"You don’t know until you get your first round of entries, and we’re beyond pleased with the attention we got and the level of entries we got in, so we should have a very packed and excitable audience in the Winter Garden."

Around 160 people are expected to attend the event.

Byrne is pleased that the work the PRII team has put into launching the awards, including establishing a secure awards platform for submissions and assembling a judging panel, has paid off.

Former PRII president Jacqueline Hall will chair the panel, which also features BIG Partnership's Orna Clarke, CARMA insights consultant Orla Graham, Business Plus Magazine editor Ben Haugh, TU Dublin Head of Journalism and Communications Dr Kevin Hora, An Post head of corporate communications Anna McHugh, former Twitter Ireland managing director Sinéad McSweeney, O'Carroll Consulting founder Niamh O'Carroll, Amárach Research chair Gerard O'Neill, and Irish Times journalist Laura Slattery.

"I am personally delighted that all the work we have done on the software of the awards platform, getting all our judges … getting the awards themselves established and launched, seeing the evidence that we’ve hit the right spot, based on the popularity that they’ve had among our members, and knowing that the shortlist will be announced before I finish up," Byrne says.

The awards also dovetail nicely with changing behaviours towards measurement and impact identified by the PRII in its third triennial census.

Looking at the raw data in recent weeks, Byrne says this year's census marks the first time she has seen a "real shift" with regard to members going beyond conventional metrics such as media coverage and reach.

The PRII Communication Impact Awards are intended to raise industry standards and promote the value of the profession, of course, but the outgoing CEO is encouraged to see that members are already comfortable talking about what they do to help their client organisations.

Photo: Dr Martina Byrne. (Pic: Chris Bellew/Fennell Photography)