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PRIA restructures membership of industry body

PRIA logoIndustry body The Public Relations Institute of Australia has announced a new membership structure designed to appeal more to PR professionals outside the major consultancies.

The membership restructure follows PRIA’s national member committee recommending changes to how the memberships offered to in-house public relations teams and students.

“One of the priorities in rebuilding PRIA was for us to look at the membership and in doing so we had a lot of conversations with our members about what worked and what didn’t,” Interim PRIA CEO Catriona Barry told Mumbrella.

“We realised that there was a whole category of membership that we weren’t servicing and while we serviced the public relations experts who were in consultancies well, we weren’t really catering for those in house and in the government and tertiary sector.”

The changes which will see organisational membership broken down into four categories of: “government”, “corporate”, “not-for-profit” and “tertiary education”.

PRIA said the restructure was not driven by the recent emergence of rival organisation the Public Relations Council, which has formed under the auspices of the Communications Council.

“This is something that would have happened anyway,” said Barry.”We are constantly reviewing our value proposition and I certainly wasn’t aware of (PRC) as a motivator for this. It was something PRIA needed to do in its own right.”

Among the benefits of the new categories of membership is a group discount to organisations with four or more staff. There will also be an overhaul of student memberships so they can offered in line with the academic year, running from April 1 to March 30 rather than reflecting the financial year.

PRIA has also introduced a “Student Ambassador Program”. The initiative will try to encourage PRIA student representatives studying Public Relations or Communication to formally interact with their peers on behalf of PRIA.

The program will see student ambassadors formally recognised by PRIA and have access to senior PR professionals. They will also have the opportunity to be published and will also be offered access to events and conferences.

The move comes less than a week after Mumbrella’s sister publications Encore revealed PRIA was moving toward an accreditation program for the PR industry. PRIA was also recently overhaul its Golden Target Awards .

“Along with our recent review of our Golden Target Awards and the changes we have introduced there, we believe these changes to our membership offerings will strike a chord with our existing membership and potential new members,” said Barry.

Nic Christensen

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