The Public Relations Institute of New Zealand launches a fresh new visual identity and way of recognising member engagement with professional development activities.
The Institute’s website quietly went live with the crisp new branding yesterday and today the Institute revealed the new look to members in its newsletter.
Chief Executive of the Public Relations Institute, Elaine Koller, provided some insight into the new branding designed by Central Station.
“The new logo – available in English and Te Reo versions – can be viewed as a pathway or stylised speech marks, and reflects the two-way nature of relationships. We’ve also moved away from using the PRINZ acronym in our logo. The acronym hasn’t disappeared completely, and we imagine members will still use this but the acronym isn’t helpful for anyone outside of the industry.
Where you see our logo represented ‘public relations’ is be written in full. While ‘public relations’ is a bit of a mouthful, we made a deliberate decision not to shorten to the term to ‘PR’. The scope of our industry is incredibly broad but ultimately – whether you specialise in internal communications for a large corporate, iwi engagement for a public sector organisation, crisis management for an agency, run social media for a not-for-profit, or any other aspect, our industry is based on relationships – and we wanted to remind people of this,” she says.
Along with the fresh look and logo, the Public Relations Institute has simplified the way it recognises member engagement in professional development activities and moved to a system of tiered bronze, silver, and gold member badges that are designed for members to use on their email signatures, professional documents, and social media.
“The new system acknowledges the incredible mahi that members do each year to develop their skills through professional development activities but with the introduction of the three tiers, also recognises those with a high drive to constantly improve and upskill,” says Koller.
Visiting the site, you can still expect to find the staple features including valuable resources, jobs board, events and course calendar, information of the PRINZ Awards and Accreditation in Public Relations (APR) prgramme, as well as the Code of Ethics which all members of the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand are committed to upholding in their practice.
