About the Conference

The event, organized by the Lithuanian Public Relations Specialists‘ Association (LRVS) and the Lithuanian Association of Public Relations Agencies (RSVA) was taking place at the Vilnius Tech Park on May 5. The event, organized for the fourth time, was more international than ever: it invited communication agencies and professionals from around the Baltic Sea region to submit their projects for the awards, an international jury consisting of 11 communication experts evaluated those applications, and there were keynote speakers from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany and Lithuania delivering their insights.

More than 130 PR and communication professionals from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia took part at the PR Impact Awards 2017 Conference. At it, a number of presentations on the PR market, its changes and trends as well as the influence of big data on and the importance of performance measurement for communications were reviewed.

“At this year’s event we have witnessed a huge competition between very professional Baltic communications agencies. This was a great opportunity to explore the work of the colleagues, to compare the Baltic trends, to discover differences and similarities. A lot of international clients look at the Baltic as a single market, thus it was a great chance to see what competences we share”, says Romualta Stonkutė, Chairwoman of the RSVA.

PaRa Impact Awards turned international in 2016. The organizers, which included the Lithuanian Public Relations Specialists’ Association and the Lithuanian Association of Public Relations Agencies, were joined by a news outlet Verslo Zinios, which became the event’s media partner. The cooperation took the event to the international level by bringing speakers from the United Kingdom and Sweden to the event and inviting PR and communications professionals from Germany, Switzerland, the UK, Finland, Estonia and Latvia to join the awards’ jury.

In addition to the established international scope, the PaRa Impact Awards extended the range of topics covered at the conference by its speakers: from social responsibility communications to a political communication and its relation to the public opinion, to the latest industry trends.

Last year’s event received the largest amount of the awards applications ever. 50 different projects were competing for “The Best Project’s” title in a number of categories, including Corporate Communication, Integrated Communication Campaign, Marketing Communications, Event, Social Media Communications and others.

The first event’s success in attracting Lithuanian PR professionals demanded the event’s increase in scope in 2015. To achieve that, the Lithuanian Public Relations Specialists’ Association, the original organizers, joined their forces with the Lithuanian Association of the Public Relations Agencies. That way, two largest PR associations in the Lithuania began contributing to the event.

The submitted PR and Communications projects competed in the Corporate Communications, Integrated Communications, Social Responsibility Communications, Social Media Communications, Press Release, Event Communications, as well as PR Officer of the Year and PR/Communication Agency of the Year categories. The event’s jury awarded projects from both public and private sectors.

PaRa 2014 was the first of its kind and the only event for PR professionals in Lithuania. Its primary goal was to encourage expertise sharing in the industry and to provide better opportunities for networking.

At the conference of 2014, a number of keynotes were delivered by nationally acknowledged communications experts, journalists and business representatives.

For the first time ever, Lithuanian PR industry received nominations in such categories as “The Tandem of the Year”, “The Most Active Business Communicators”, “The Spokesperson of the Year” and “The Project of the Year”.