CIPR International EGM 2018 - Chair's address

Did you miss our EGM on 25 November? Please find below the transcript of the Chair’s address – do let us know your thoughts. Don’t forget to have a look at #CIPRIntTrustResearch to read a summary of the engaging panel debate on communicating research that took place following on from the EGM, and make sure to sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know about our future events.

By Shirley Collyer

Since we last met in February we have again strived to provide our members with information and education throughout the year, as well as tried to expand our membership. This activity has been against a backdrop of GDPR, which has made communication much more difficult. We have a great comms team, run by Merete Donlon, which aims to keep you all up to date through our newsletters and our social media feeds.

This year we have expanded geographically. We now have CIPR International Groups in Jamaica, run by Richard Rose, and in Mauritius, run by Samantha Seewoosurrun. These groups are trying to increase professionalism and encourage skills and education in those locations. It’s early days for them but both Richard and Samantha have successfully publicised these groups and have gained a lot of interest.

In September this year, our Vice Chair, Andras Sztaniszlav, headed to East Africa where he attended and spoke at, the AGM of the Uganda PR association.

We’ve arranged a number of events since February – indeed the AGM itself was followed by a lively journalist debate on topics such as fake news and the rise of populism. Thank you, Beatrice, for organising such lively and interesting events!

We once again ran the Maggie Nally Memorial Lecture in May – organised by Flora Wilke – when this year we heard from Ricardo Carioni, the deputy ambassador of Nicaragua to the United Kingdom.

Unfortunately, we were just not able to run the Global PRactice conference this year. But we’re running a series of smaller events to replace this over the year and in early October we ran an event on Artificial Intelligence in PR, in conjunction with the Greater London Group and the AIinPR group, where attendees learnt about how to construct a chatbot and discussed the ethical issues involved in AI. A podcast with the speakers discussing the topic is available on our website.

To continue our “Doing PR in ….” series, we have run a number of webinars, this year covering Cambodia and India, arranged by Alessandra and Andras. We also aim to produce podcasts from as many of our events as possible to enable our members around the world to access these events – Lansons has kindly offered its services here.

As I said at the beginning, a busy year and I’d like to thank everyone on the committee for their hard work and the time they have spent on CIPR International.