AN Ennis resident has won two international business awards for public relations and communications in Barcelona.
Nicola Corless, originally from Mayo but who has been living in Ennis for the past 10 years is to receive a Gold and a Silver Stevie® Award at the 14th Annual International Business Awards, which will be held in Barcelona in October. The awards recognise her work within the Marketing and Communications Division of University of Limerick.
UL was the outright winner in the Communications or PR Campaign of the Year – Global Issues category for which it will receive a Gold Stevie® Award. The university marketing and communications division also won a Silver Stevie® Award in the Communications or PR Campaign of the Year – Low Budget (Under $10,000 / € 7,000) category.
Judges described the public relations campaign, Meet the Mesentery, The Organ Hiding in Plain Sight, led by UL’s Communications Officer Nicola Corless, as “an excellent showcase of PR skills and story-telling ability”.
This is the second time Nicola’s work has been recognised this year. In June, she was highly commended in the Excellence in Public Relations 2017 Awards, run by the Public Relations Institute of Ireland and the Public Relations Consultants Association.
The winning campaign highlighted the research of Professor Calvin Coffey, Professor of Surgery at UL’s Graduate Entry Medical School and Consultant Surgeon at UL Hospitals Group, to a worldwide audience of tens of millions of people. It resulted in more than 2,000 stories published and broadcast in some of the world’s best-known news outlets including the BBC, Financial Times,
The Washington Post, CNN, CBS News and Fox News.
Prior to joining UL’s Marketing and Communications division in September 2016, Nicola Corless, who is originally from County Mayo worked as a journalist in The Clare Champion and in this capacity she won Feature Story of the Year Award at the Local Ireland journalism awards which recognise the best regional journalism in Ireland.
“I’m delighted to see UL honoured by the International Business Awards with two Communications and PR Campaign of the Year awards. It is great to see the excellent work of our Communications Officer Nicola Corless and our small but dedicated in-house communications team recognized on a global stage. These two international awards are a very welcome endorsement of the new strategic approach to marketing and communicating at UL,” said Mark Mulqueen, Director of Marketing and Communications at UL.
According to Jacqueline Purcell, IBA judge and International Public Relations Association (IPRA) Board Member: “Meet the mesentery, the organ hiding in plain sight is an astonishing story of what perseverance can do. University of Limerick, Ireland, is an energetic and enterprising institution with a record of innovation and excellence in education, research and scholarship. The dynamic, entrepreneurial and pioneering values which drive UL’s mission and strategy ensures that it capitalises on local, national and international engagement and connectivity and this campaign and evidence back up those claims.
“Both Professor Coffey and Nicola are to be commended on this low budget and high-impact publicity to create a rare story,” Ms Purcell continued.
A record total of more than 3,900 nominations from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted this year for consideration in a wide range of categories, including Company of the Year, Marketing Campaign of the Year, Best New Product or Service of the Year, Startup of the Year, Corporate Social Responsibility Program of the Year, and Executive of the Year, among others.
A native of Ennis, Colin McGann has been editor of The Clare Champion since August 2020. Former editor of The Clare People, he is a journalism and communications graduate of Dublin Institute of Technology.