PR BRIDGE NETWORK

2005-11-13T12:35:00.000+01:00

Dear Colleagues,

Dr. Dumitru Bortun, the President of the Asociatia Romana a Profesionistilor in Relatii Publice, invited the international guests, speakers to a joint meeting at 8th November 2005, after the final plenary meeting of the Romanian PR Week. Some public relations experts participated in this meeting, not only from Romania, but from Germany, United Kingdom, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, as well. Among others, there were Thomas Achelis, the President and Professor Thomas Barat, the immediate past Vice President of CERP, the European Public Relations Confederation, Professor Tony Meehan from UK and Nelly Benova - Dimitrova, the President of the Bulgarian Public Relations Society and other pr-experts.

At the Bucharest meeting the participants discussed the problems of the European public relations. The participants clarified, that the challenges, the problems are very similar in the new member and the candidate states of EU, as well.

Public Relations need the democracy. The democracy needs the Public Relations.

In 2002, at the IPRA Central and Eastern European Conference, the participants adopted the IPRA Budapest Statement. The participants of this Bucharest conference followed the thoughts of the Budapest statement and stated that it is very important to organize a better relationship between the EU member and candidate countries. The member states could help the candidate countries to join to the EU more fluently.

The participants also stated that it is not necessary to establish a new official professional organization, like association, but it is very important to establish a network. In the world are functioning some professional organization, like IPRA, CERP, GA, and the national associations, like HPRA, as well. Even so, it is important to develop the networking of public relations practitioners and experts, living in different countries. If we could work like an effective network, we could help each others.

Professor Sam Black, in an interview at the Budapest TV, stated, some years ago: „The task of the Public Relations is the mutual understanding - and what is the PR? The Public Relations is a bridge.” I would like to continue the Sam Black’s statement. „The Public Relations practitioners are similar to an interpreter. An interpreter is on the bridge. The task of PR practitioners is to be an interpreter for achieving mutual understanding.

In Bucharest, the participants of this meeting decided to establish a Public Relations network in the interest of the mutual beneficial relationship. This network will connect the particpating countries with their pr-experts and their environment. We would call this network PR BRIDGE.
Our PR BRIDGE NETWORK would be an on-line based virtual and hopefully effective network. We would like to organise the contacts first of all on-line, in a Blog and a mutual e-mail list, but we would like also to meet each other at different conferences.

In the democratic societies the public relations profession needs a network in order to develop ethical and professional advanced standards in public relations.
The establishment of PR BRIDGE NETWORK, acting as a Virtual Society, has become necessary to reach the highest level of professional cooperation, in order to build mutual beneficial relationships among the public relations professionals.

This deceison is supported by the International Communications Forum, the Endowment of Development of Public Relations and the European Media and Communication Institute. These three organisations, in the frame of supporting, assumes to coordinate the network.

Come and join us! We are awaiting the participation of all public relations experts, practitioners, educators etc, who would like to acting in the network.

Please send us your remarks, comments and ideas. Let’s discuss the corporate communication and public relations issues. Let’s speak about the problems and the solutions, as well.

The PR BRIDGE NETWORK has an internal e-mail group.
You can subscribe to the internal e-mail group:
prbridge-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
If you would like to send any comments or ideas to the members of the group, please post your message:
prbridge@yahoogroups.com

Let’s work together to build up the PR BRIDGE NETWORK.

Best regards

Professor Thomas Barat
Past CERP-Vice President
The coordinator of PR BRIDGE NETWORK