IBP giving ‘added value’ to members

Executive Committee Report to AGM.

IBP has made an important start to the process of giving ‘added value’ to its membership over the past year, Gerald Bowey, Chief Executive Officer of IBP Services, told the IBP Annual General Meeting, held at The Building Centre, London, on Thursday June 24. He said that in March IBP launched its ‘In-house Magazine of the Year Award’ designed to recognise the work of colleagues engaged in the creation of publications aimed at very specific sectors of the construction market. (The award was presented at the IBP Summer Dinner held at the Royal Opera House on July 8).

He said this initiative had also demonstrated the major contribution made by freelance journalists to these in-house publications. This led him to the second major initiative of the year which was the creation of the IBP Freelance Journalist Directory - a free service providing listings of freelance journalists, their areas of expertise,their ways of working and their cost structures.The Directory is to be launched to coincide with the 2004 Journalism Awards Scheme and will be actively promoted by IBP, through the IBP website, to commissioning editors and other public relations practitioners and professionals.

Gerald Bowey told the AGM that the Executive Committee was also working towards the establishment of a Regional Journalism Awards Scheme to enable journalists in locations outside London to showcase their work. It is hoped that one such scheme can be launched in the autumn. He also reported that the 2004 national Journalism Awards Scheme was already fully sponsored, ‘a true testament to the high regard in which leading names in the construction industry hold the work of its journalists.

In conclusion Gerald Bowey said that IBP needed to recruit new members if it was to continue to fund the initiatives already outlined and to develop new ones. He said: ‘We are an industry in which people move around more often than most others. On average we lose 30 members each year but from the new award initiative alone we have recruited 25 new members and in the first six months of this year we have attracted in total over 40 new members.‘However, we must not just mark time in replacing members but actively encourage our existing members to recruit the right type of journalists and PR