A Win-Win Situation: Not 1, But 2 PR Awards!
Akins Marketing & Design won two—count them—two Public Relations Society of America Silver Mercury Awards for Integrated Communications and Community Relations for a Nonprofit. The awards were for the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Campaign that we conducted in 2007 for the Connecticut Department of Public Health. The statewide campaign included traditional and new media, public relations and grassroots outreach.
We developed the campaign identity, posters, bilingual flyers, English and Spanish brochures, and ads for ethnic newspapers in African-American, West Indian, Hispanic, Portuguese, Haitian, Polish and Chinese communities. The media buy, which featured a 30-sec. TV spot with Governor Rell as spokesperson, included public service announcements on networks affiliates, cable, and the Hispanic TV channel, Univision. Banner ads and a 10-sec. spot were created for media websites. We also arranged for appearances of DPH medical experts on radio and TV talk shows throughout Connecticut.
At the grassroots level, we created a speaker’s tool kit for local health directors for presentations to chambers of commerce, service organizations, and senior centers. Flyers were emailed to 100 senior centers and 57 chambers of commerce. Bilingual bag stuffers were provided to A&P, Big Y, C-Town, Shaw’s, Shop Rite, Stop & Shop, and Foodshare, a consortium of 400 Connecticut food banks.
To ensure the objectivity of the selection process, the judging was done by Public Relations Society of America members in Kentucky. We were proud to accept the awards in June at a recognition dinner attended by some of the top agencies in the state.
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