Help write the CIPR’s story as part of 70th anniversary project

The CIPR is crowdsourcing the knowledge of its members as part of its 70th anniversary celebrations in 2018.

The CIPR is 70 next year. It plans to create a book as part of a year of anniversary celebrations. It’s a special project that I’m delighted to have been asked to lead.

Celebrating a special anniversary

We’re asking CIPR members to help tell the story of the organisation and showcase excellence in public relations practice. It's a very modern application of public relations to celebrate a very special anniversary.

The project will reinforce the 2018 President Sarah Hall’s theme of public relations as a strategic management discipline. We want to gain an audience beyond the public relations profession.

My vision is to create a legacy for CIPR members and the broader business community that will inspire practitioners and support continuous learning and development.

It is envisaged that the book will consist of 30 to 50 essays, each of 800 to 1,200 words in length.

Crowdsourcing a community of practice

The Cluetrain Manifesto and The Wisdom of Crowds both showed us the potential of crowdsourcing as a powerful means of building a community of practice.

Share This, Share This Too, and Chartered Public Relations are all examples of book that the CIPR has previously published using this approach. The #PRstack and #FuturePRoof communities are both based on this model.

Essays are invited in five areas of public relations, related to the CIPR's history, purpose and campaigning.

• Perspective – reflections on the CIPR’s history and its communities
• Practice – a discussion of modern areas of public relations practice
• Performance – the impact of practising public relations as a management discipline on modern organisations
• Provocation – issues relating to the profession such as diversity (age, ethnicity, socio-economic background and gender); and mental health
• Potential – exploring the future of the profession such as automation, artificial intelligence, and tools

How to submit a pitch

CIPR members interested in contributing to the project should read the contributors’ guidelines (opens as a PDF) and submit a pitch by 3 November, 2017.

The project will be managed using modern workflow and contributors will be invited to review each other’s work to ensure a high quality threshold. You should be comfortable using cloud based tools such as DropBox, private Facebook communities, and Google Documents.

If you’ve any questions please contact me by email or call me on 07771 815407.