FOUR Philippine entries have won the 2021 Gold Quill Awards bestowed by the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) headquartered in Chicago, USA. These are the Ayala Group of Companies, Union Bank of the Philippines, Megaworld Foundation and the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines (Finex) in tandem with Media Wise Communications.
“Stronger Together: How the Ayala Group Helped Filipinos Cope with the Pandemic” is the winner for the “Covid-19 Response and Recovery Management and Communication” category. In the “Corporate Social Responsibility” category, Union Bank’s “Heroes 2021: A CSR Campaign in the Time of Pandemic” emerged victorious, along with Megaworld’s “Mega Summer Ventures #RoamFromHome” under the “Social Media” category.
Among all Gold Quill awardees worldwide this year, the lone coffeetable book in the “Publications” category is “FINEX 50: Leading on to Wider Frontiers,” co-published by FINEX and Media Wise. The 238-page volume commemorates the golden jubilee of the country’s foremost finance organization, with a parallel history of events that shaped the Philippine economy over the past 50 years.
Significantly, FINEX 50 also won the Philippine Quill Award from IABC Philippines earlier this year and is slated to receive the Silver Quill Award from IABC Asia Pacific in the third quarter. The latter is given to the Gold Quill awardees that are based in the Asian and Australian continents. That makes the FINEX coffeetable book a grand slam winner in IABC’s national, regional, and global competitions.
For more than four decades, the IABC Gold Quill Awards program has recognized innovative and strategic communication work globally that soars above the average and delivers significant results. By joining the program, entries are validated against a global standard and a measure that elevates groundbreaking work to identify “the best of the best” communication efforts in the world.
As part of the selection process, all entries are evaluated by international communicators who have more than 10 years of professional experience. Majority of these evaluators have earned Gold Quill Awards themselves. A pair of evaluators scores each entry independently and reconciles their scores at “blue ribbon panels” either virtually or at face-to-face locations in Vancouver, Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco, Johannesburg, London, Dubai, Manila, Sydney, Melbourne and Wellington.
Media Wise, a Metro Manila-based boutique publishing company, is the first and only organization in the Philippines that has bagged the Gold Quill Awards three years in a row under the same category. Prior to its award-winning FINEX 50 book, it won in 2020 for “On the March: The Jesuits in the Philippines Since the Restoration” and, likewise, in 2019 for “The Front Runner: 150 Years of the Manila Jockey Club.”
Due to the pandemic, this year’s awards night on June 29 will be held via Zoom instead of the in-person ceremony originally scheduled in New York City. The virtual Excellence Gala will take place during the 2021 IABC World Conference, where the winners from 22 countries will be recognized.
Joseph Gamboa is the co-chairman of the Finex Annual Conferences for 2020-2021, chairman of the Finex Business Columns Subcommittee, and director of Noble Asia Industrial Corp. The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the opinion of these institutions and the BusinessMirror.