Back and forth

Here we go again... Yet another blog post on a night out at an awards ceremony! Last Friday night we attended our fourth one of the year so far - the Thames and Chiltern CIPR PRide Awards. These awards celebrate work done in the public sector and this was the second one of these we were due to attend after the CIPR Local Public Services Awards back in February. This time we were shortlisted for Best use of Digital (for our corporate film) and Best use of Social Media (for our Clearing campaign).

Having a full table meant we could
make quite a noise when our categories
were announced!

After some time off studying, and a few days of respite to digest my new knowledge, I whizzed into Luton to meet the team in the office. It was definitely quite amusing finding them sat at their desks wearing their finery before the taxi took us to the (conveniently local) Sopwell House in St. Albans where the ceremony was due to take place! Our group for the evening were Elisabeth and Lauren from my team, Sarah from the Marketing team and Andy, our Market Research Manager. We also had some very special guests as we were joined by Spectrecom who did an amazing job of working with us on our corporate film. Finally, the evening would not have been complete without a blast from the past in the form of Hannah! She has now moved on to a promotion elsewhere but seeing as our two nominations were predominantly her work (and she wrote the awards entries!) it wouldn't have been right to exclude her...

After being the first to arrive (I guess we had the easiest journey) we sat down for a very nice three course meal (we're getting used to these now) and the awards proper. Our first nomination came around pretty quickly and we were delighted to win another silver for Best use of Digital. This was actually our fifth silver in the last few years showing a definite pattern!

Us receiving our gold award on the
stage. Black was definitely the outfit
colour choice of the evening...

However, the curse was soon to be broken when it was announced that we were awarded GOLD for Best use of Social Media! Finally, a new start! Needless to say were were extremely happy and I could hardly hide my excitement by bouncing up and down in my chair.

To top off a brilliant evening the Marketing team also won gold in their category for Best External Publication followed by another surprise award for Best use of Research, Planning, Measurement and Evaluation. Wow! A clean sweep - I'm guessing we weren't that popular with the rest of the room. Andy was particularly pleased to have won a much deserved award for his research especially as he has teased us in the past for our insatiable appetite to be externally recognised at these ceremonies! This is to be the penultimate awards ceremony of the year with our fifth and final one taking place on 19th November where we are nominated for Best Website at the Graduate Prospects awards. Let's hope we go out in style...!