Quinn & Co. Public Relations of New York, NY, won a Stevie Award for Communications or PR Campaign of the Year in The 2009 American Business Awards

You couldn’t ask for a better client. New York City-based Quinn & Co. Public Relations was tapped by Tourism Queensland (Australia) to promote their first global marketing campaign—"The Best Job in the World"—in North America. Conceived and developed by Tourism Queensland and their ad agency CumminsNitro Brisbane, it was executed in the United States and Canada by Quinn & Co. 

The Job
The ground-breaking campaign created an international search for a real, six-month job—paying about $100,000—for an "island caretaker" to live rent free on Australia’s Hamilton Island, Queensland. The job description was for the caretaker to travel the islands of the Great Barrier Reef and to report back via video and blog to Tourism Queensland's head office and the world.  Hot, dusty work … but somebody had to do it.

Other key partners were XCom Media (digital agency) and Livingstones Australia (human resources).

The Goal
The public relations goals of the campaign were to create global consumer awareness for a minimum investment, to promote the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef as a desirable destination, and to establish the concept of "Life Above The Reef." 

The PR Campaign
The story broke with Quinn & Co.'s Reuters placement around sunrise in Australia on January 12, 2009. By breakfast time in London, AP was interviewing Tourism Queensland's UK director for a broadcast package which turned up later that day on the morning shows in the U.S.  Within two days, Tourism Queensland's monitoring service had found 1,100 TV placements in the U.S. alone.

A total of 34,684 candidates from more than 200 countries posted one-minute video applications explaining why each should be chosen as island caretaker. As of March 18, 2009, the Web site for the "Best Job in the World" (www.islandreefjob.com) had a total of 6.7 million visitors, with 26%, or 1.7 million visitors, logging in from the U.S. These totals blasted past Tourism Queensland's original goal to get 400,000 new visitors to the Web site over the course of the one-year campaign. Global interest also sparked increased visitation to all Tourism Queensland web sites and doubled monthly registrations for Tourism Queensland's Image Gallery online.

A social networking frenzy began with 336,000 Facebook-referred Web site visits, more than 3,170 @Queensland followers on Twitter, and over 338 members on the campaign's Wiki (islandreefjob.ning.com). By March 18, some 423,000 people (including 210,000 from the U.S.) had voted for their favorite top-50 finalist.

		Read the entire article

Big Fish School of Digital Filmmaking of Johannesburg, South Africa, won the Stevie Award for Corporate Social Responsibility Program of the Year in the Middle East and Africa in The 2009 International Business Awards.

Big Fish
Big Fish, a school of digital filmmaking based in the suburbs of Johannesburg, was founded in 2003 by Dr. Melanie Chait. Its mission is to create jobs and provide skills training for historically disadvantaged South African school-leavers who would otherwise have no access to further education.

Big Fish is the only accredited not-for-profit, Section 21 film school in South Africa. It offers world-class training in cutting-edge technology with award-winning tutors.

The film school has so far received some 2,000 applications and trained 700 people in fully sponsored courses, with an 85% employment rate for former students, and the remainder working on their own projects. And Big Fish is having a wider impact: It is bringing sustainable change and improvement to the lives of around 5,000 members of those students’ extended families.

The school’s recipe for success has been a practical hands-on approach. Students receive intensive training from an impressive list of tutors (including the likes of Gavin Hood, director of the Oscar-winning Tsotsi, and Jacques Pauw, (a  multi-award-winning special assignment producer for CNN); and at the end of their courses, students are ensured workplace experience through the efforts of a full-time Big Fish staff member whose job is solely to find the students internships and, ultimately, paying jobs.

Proof of the high quality of its courses is that the film school has won a number of awards since its founding in 2003, beating out other South African film schools with its prize-winning documentaries.

		Read the entire article

SchoolDude.com, the U.S.A.'s leading provider of on-demand operations management solutions designed exclusively for the unique needs of schools, colleges and universities, won the Stevie Award for Front-line Customer Service Team of the Year in the 2008 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Started in 2000, SchoolDude.com now has more than 4,000 clients.

We recently spoke with Joan Maddox, VP-Client Services with the company, about how the firm began, what it does, and how she's built its customer service department into a world-class operation.

Joan will be one of the final judges for the 2009 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

		Listen to the Podcast Interview with Joan Maddox of SchoolDude.com ...

Blogs, or web logs, are all the rage these days. Each month in this space we'll point you to several blogs that we think might be of interest to you.

Games That Give: You play. They donate.
Clear Path International: Clear Path assists thousands of landmine accident survivors in five countries: Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, and Afghanistan with the help of grassroots and institutional donors in the United States and Europe.
Nerve.com: Irreverant coverage of love, sex, culture.