Reconnecting After Two Decades: A Member’s Accreditation Journey
It’s not every day that PRINZ’s inbox receives a picture of a coffee-stained, embossed letter reading “Congratulations on passing your PRINZ accreditation exams and welcome to the ranks of Member with a ‘capital M’”. The head office team were intrigued to receive this email from Aimee Driscoll. After 25 years in the Public Relations sector and long time PRINZ member, she reached out to ask if times had changed, was the accreditation still valid and what should the post nominal be? MPRINZ or APR? Of course, MPRINZ is now referred to as APR but the accreditation still stands to provide members with a stamp of professionalism in Public Relations and Communications. So captured by this email that we just had to connect with Aimee, we found ourselves inspired by her rich and wide-ranging career.
Aimee’s interest in Public Relations began while observing her mother roll out a campaign against drunk driving called “Don’t drink and drive, rock in your own bed tonight”. She subsequently spent her tertiary education gaining qualifications in media arts, women’s politics and Māori culture.
Like many fresh graduates, Aimee’s eagerness for the industry was met with a lack of job opportunities straight out of the gate. Luckily, a colleague of her mother’s from the Ministry of Health remembered Aimee and offered her a junior position at the Health Funding Authority (HFA), her very first ‘real’ fulltime job in Public Relations.
When she started her career at HFA in 1994, there was one single computer to be shared by the whole office. By the time she left, it had evolved into a workplace where everyone had their own PC and phone. In the late 90s, she was seconded to the Hilary Commission where she helped launch the Green Prescription campaign. This campaign made big waves and was proudly one of the first initiatives to promote mental health interventions combined with physical health. After gaining her APR qualification, she then moved into the FMCG sector. She saw and reported on the turn of the millennium while she was with Shell Oil. She then spent a number of years in various roles for Coca-Cola and Kraft (Cadbury). She jokes “I spent many years representing brown liquid”. She noted that her career as a Public Relations professional has allowed her to work in every industry from university, to local government, FMCG, agriculture, health, tourism, transport, finance and non-profit organisations, all under the communications discipline.
Aimee, with five years of experience, completed her APR accreditation in 1998. She was the youngest accredited PR practitioner in New Zealand at that time, a feat that earned a spread in Women’s Weekly. She said the most beneficial aspect of the accreditation for her was that it was internationally recognised. When she took an OE after working with Shell Oil for two years, she was able to register with a site called Stockgap to find PR work. Across her three years abroad, she lived in London and Edinburgh and was able to practise communications for companies like Hilton International and Halifax Bank of Scotland. She said leveraging her accreditation was invaluable to her overseas experience.
Based in Tauranga these days, Aimee is loving working for SPCA. It is incredible to see how her career has spanned different industries, financial models and even countries. We are thrilled that PRINZ and APR have played a part in her expansive career. If you have five to eight years experience in the PR and communications space and feel you are ready to validate the breadth of that experience you should consider earning your APR accreditation. Visit our website to learn more about APR.
We will leave the final word to Aimee: “As a mother of three girls, one of whom is studying communications, I often reflect on my career and wonder if it has influenced them as my mother influenced me. Looking back at my communications career, I think about my ‘why.’ Why have I stayed in this field all this time? The answer is simple: when people have access to the right information at the right moment, it can make a real difference in their next decision or action. And even if my role is small, I feel privileged to be part of that journey.”.
Thank you Aimee for allowing us to share your story.
