Pensacola Chapter members and organizations were honored at the Florida Public Relations Association’s Golden Image Awards and Pinnacle Awards Gala held Aug. 6, at the Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay as part of the PR & Comms Summit, a 3-day communications and marketing conference. Whitney Fike, Regional Communications Manager at International Paper, received the Gold Pinnacle Award for Communicator of the Year. This was awarded to a public relations or communications practitioner who does exceptional work as a solo practitioner or as part of an agency, business, nonprofit or other organization that has some element of its business in the state of Florida.
Nonprofit and for-profit organizations throughout the United States were invited to submit their projects for consideration during the 2024 awards program. Each entry was reviewed by a judging panel comprised of leaders in the public relations and communications industry.
Other local winners:
Brittany Sherwood, President of FPRA Pensacola Chapter received a President’s Award for Professional Development.
Visit Pensacola; Nicole Stacey, Vice President | Destination Development and Lindsey Steck Jackson, Marketing and Communications Manager received an Award of Distinction for Visit Pensacola Influencer Marketing Campaign.
University of West Florida Office of Institutional Communications received an Award of Distinction for the 100K Alumni campaign.
Background Information:
The Golden Image Awards consists of four divisions: Public Relations Programs, Collateral of Public Relations, Digital Tools of Public Relations and Student Projects in Public Relations. Each division is comprised of multiple categories. This year, the awards presented included: Judges’ Award, for entries that demonstrate outstanding return on investment; Judges’ Creativity Award, for entries that demonstrate outstanding creativity; Award of Distinction, for excellent and high scoring entries within each category; Golden Image Awards, for the highest scoring entry in each category; Grand Golden Image Awards, for the top entries in the Collateral of Public Relations and the Digital Tools of Public Relations divisions; and the Dick Pope All Florida Golden Image Award, for the top entry in the Public Relations Programs division.
The awards ceremony also included the inaugural Pinnacle Awards, a new award program designed to recognize the individual communicators, agencies and teams performing exceptional work in public relations and communications, not tied to a specific project. Awards presented included Silver and Gold Pinnacle Awards in the following categories: Small Agency of the Year, Medium Agency of the Year, Nonprofit Team of the Year, Government Team of the Year, Corporate Team of the Year, and Communicator of the Year. Award winners were chosen by FPRA’s past state presidents.
