04 Oct Tebogo Ditshego details restructuring of the Prism Awards

With the announcement earlier this month of the Prism Awards restructuring, we spoke with Tebogo Ditshego, president of Prisa, to find out more about the move to do so.

Tell us a bit more about yourself and your role as Prisa president?
My responsibility is to oversee the operations of Prisa from a governance perspective, ensure the strategies and directives from the board and structures of Prisa are implemented and provide strategic leadership for the public relations and communication sector.

What do you love most about your work?
What I love most about being the president of Prisa is contributing towards the creation and enabling environment for all of our stakeholders to prosper and being a part of the work that goes into developing public relations and communication professions.

Tell us a bit about the Prism awards.
The Prism Awards are the leading awards in the public relations and communication sector and they are the flagship awards of Prisa that recognise excellence in the industry.

Tell us a little bit about the recent restructuring of the Prism awards, how is it going so far?
The structure will change to being governed by the Public Relations Consultancy Chapter (PRCC) and advised by the PRCC Advisory Board which consists of all public relations consultancies registered with Prisa.

With this new structure in place, Prisa calls on public relations consultancies to register with Prisa and participate in the professionalisation of the industry to ensure that we’re benchmarked with international best practices.

How do you plan to reach a wider audience?
We are going to revamp the categories of the Prism Awards to ensure they are more representative of our industry. We’ll also embark on outreach programmes as well as thought leadership initiatives to attract a broader audience and add more value for our members.

How do you plan to improve transparency?
Transparency will be enhanced with the introduction of auditors in the Prism Awards who will implement best practices for awards that will improve accountability.

Why was the decision made to put these practices into place?
The Prism Awards did not have auditors in the past and there wasn’t enough participation from the onset from our public relations consultancies, now they are actively involved as we have organised them into an advisory board that will be the special advisors of the governance structure of the Prism Awards which is the PRCC committee that reports to the board.

What kind of impact are you hoping these practices will have in future?
With this restructure, we hope to inspire future growth in the industry

BY: EMILY STANDER