The Gold Quill awards have long been established as the pinnacle achievement for professional communicators around the globe. Each year they attract hundreds of high-quality international entries from across the industry, showcasing the demonstrable impact that communicators can deliver for their stakeholders.
For over 40 years, the Gold Quill Awards has set the standard, raised the bar, improved lives, and built legacies that not only fulfilled and inspired professionals all over the world, but also delivered impact and grew the body of work in our profession.
IABC/Calgary warmly congratulates our member, Gord Laird, on receiving three prestigious Gold Quill Awards in April 2024. Ghalib Sumar, Co-Director of Member Communications (Newsletter and Blog) for IABC/Calgary interviewed Gord on his accomplishments, and we are pleased to share this with all of our members.
IABC Member since: 2013
Current Position: Communications Strategist, Department of People, Innovation & Collaboration Services, City of Calgary
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grdnlrd
Q: Can you tell us how you got into the communications profession, where your career has taken you, and what your best piece of advice is for others in the profession?
A: I started as a journalist who did communications consulting on the side. My work doing documentary and feature writing enabled me to travel widely, immersing myself in situations that often had social, political and/or environmental complexity. If there was a story that needed to be told, I’d often drop in for a week or two just to talk to people, gather insights and make connections as to how everything works.
From covering pipeline megaprojects to connecting with Inuit elders about climate change, journalism was actually good training for corporate and organizational communications because I was challenged to untangle complex issues and relationships and find the storyline that connected it all.
As for advice, anyone who is in the storytelling business needs to fuel their curiosity wherever possible. If I can find even the smallest bit of a mundane tactic interesting, for example, the speed and quality of my work usually increases.
Our ability to harness the power of narrative is what makes communications unique and effective: being curious about one’s work, where possible, makes it easier to find the story.
Another thing that I’ve seen in my journey is that many of the issues and challenges that require strategic communications are ultimately quite similar across all sectors, public or private. Once your organization is larger than a few hundred people, regardless of the business, there are shared dynamics and solutions that we can all learn from.
I spent three years as the communications leader for the Calgary Fire Department, for example, and emergency services is a highly-disciplined business: 1500 employees working 24/7 across a customer base of 1.3 million people. It’s truly impressive.
Understanding this business – its priorities, strengths and issues, all from a communications perspective – was key to thriving as a communications team.
Working with Fire Chief Steve Dongworth, who is an excellent communicator, my six-person communications team won three Gold Quill awards in three years taking an embedded, collaborative approach. And with an emphasis on gathering operational metrics, we demonstrated business outcomes in occupational safety, internal communications and community-based fire prevention. More about that here.
Q: What is the best part of having a career in communications? What advice would you give to someone who is new to the field?
A: The best part of communications is getting to work with some of the best people in an organization, solving really interesting problems. Sometimes all the right things come together: great leadership, clear and relevant mission, metrics, adequate resources and, as always, time.
Sometimes these elements do not come together and we still do our jobs. There are things we can learn doing communications that are more tactical or reactive. There are always things we can learn from clients who are challenging or don’t see the strategic value of communications. Not all our work merits a Gold Quill entry.
I think training and seeking out interesting problems are key parts of one’s professional evolution at any level of communications. We are all students.
For those entering the profession, try to find work opportunities that are interesting to you, and there’s a good chance you’ll also find strategic problems to solve. If you can find mentors and quality leadership along the way, even better.
The IABC offers many ways to learn at any stage of one’s career, and I think that’s so important in this field.
Q: What motivated you to apply for the awards? And can you tell us more about the awards you have won?
A: Early on in my career at The City of Calgary, I was part of projects where we applied for awards because we simply thought the work was great. Everyone had worked hard, clients were more or less happy and improved communications metrics were achieved, output-based stuff like web page visits. All of those entries were unsuccessful.
After learning more and maturing my approach, the motivation to enter the Gold Quills became less about seeking professional validation and more about going deeper on key pieces of work.
Until recently, for example, I spent the last four years leading cyber security awareness communications in my organization. With the escalation of international cybercrime, especially the very real threat of ransomware, this portfolio has grown significantly because employees are often the most viable attack vector for online criminals. Tricking humans to click on malware that can immobilize an entire organization, then hold it for ransom, remains an attractive business model for both small-time hackers and state-sponsored threat actors.
So when City leadership determined in 2022 that increased cyber awareness and mandatory cyber security training was required for all 17,000 municipal employees, our two-person security communications team were in high agreement but also highly intimidated by the work that lay ahead of us.
Cyber training only works as a security control when a high percentage of internet and email users have the same minimum level of cyber skills and awareness. We needed high compliance; this was not just an on-paper exercise.
It was at this point that it became clear we also needed a Gold Quill mindset to solve this problem. It was an opportunity to start at square one and do everything right.
A multi-disciplinary team was assembled, spanning communications, security, IT and City leadership. Audience research was undertaken, including pre- and post-project employee surveys. We engaged communicators from business units across the corporation to gather audience insights and enlist their support for our work, since communications on the usual corporate channels would not suffice.
Our project implemented a multi-phase campaign between August 2022 and March 2023 that emphasized change management, organizational strategy, multi-stage branded communications and targeted communications.
Many parts of our organization delivered great work, especially when they understood the importance of this mission. Our two-person security communications team became part of a much bigger effort that enlisted some of our City’s best marketing talent, communications research, IT and technical security experts, training and risk management.
In the end, the results were strong. Our organization’s first cyber training campaign in fall 2022 resulted in over 81.5% of all employees and contractors (all primary audiences) completing their training by the end of 2023, with nearly 90% completions among wired (office-based) employees.
More importantly, following campaign rollout and high compliance, we saw a 52% corporate-wide decrease in user clicks on malicious email between January 2023 to January 2024, compared to previous years. After more users completed training by April 2023, an additional monthly click decrease was observed, resulting in a 73% decrease in clicks on malicious email between May 2023 to January 2024, compared to previous years.
A June 2023 post-training survey of City employees validated these results: 79% of surveyed employees said their ability to protect themselves against cyber threats had increased as a result of mandatory cyber security training in 2022-2023. Surveyed employees also reported that they can better recognize social engineering attacks, key to avoiding advanced scams, representing an increase of 29% compared to pre-campaign baseline.
In the end, the project was awarded 2024 Gold Quills in three categories for Communications Management: Internal Communications, Safety Communications and Change Communications.
Q: You are also a Gold Quill Award evaluator since 2022. Can you share the best part of being on both sides of the equation (i.e. having won awards and also evaluating and judging awards?)
A: Being an IABC evaluator has been really quite eye-opening. Each two-person evaluation receives 3-6 entries from around the world across many Gold Quill categories. I’ve evaluated campaigns from SE Asia, Australia, Europe and the United States. Over the last two years, there was only one entry each year that scored high enough to win a Gold Quill in its category. So the process is rigorous and very much structured to score strategic outcomes, not just good work.
Being an evaluator has helped me to better understand what constitutes a competitive entry, from beginning to end. It’s also developed my own communications skills, learning from the experience of the entrants, about metrics, audience research, creative, marketing – all the elements required for great work.
Being an IABC evaluator does sometime require more time than expected, however never as much as creating a competitive entry!
Q: What advice would you give to someone who aspires to win a Gold Quill Award one day?
A: What I learned through the Gold Quill process, including learning from adjudicator feedback on my own unsuccessful entries, is that strategic communications is partially about mindset as well as skills, resources and training.
How we initially perceive a communications problem or opportunity has great impact on the solutions we shape and overall outcomes. We can’t see everything ourselves, which is why it’s important to do engagement, research and capacity-building across one’s organization when there’s a big project to accomplish.
This isn’t always possible. So watch for those opportunities where all the right elements might come together: your first campaign will be to enlist everyone you need to be on your project team, regardless of who they report to. Don’t be afraid to ask for resources either, especially related to research, creative and metrics.
Finally, if you are pulling together what you think is a competitive entry, study all the IABC resources. Understand the rubrics and scoring system as this is how your work will be evaluated. Writing and assembling a competitive entry can be a significant project on its own, so give yourself lots of time before the deadline. Lots of time.
Q: Any last words? Or something you want to share with the IABC/Calgary membership base?
A: Anything significant in our world exists in some sort of relationship – and it’s often communicators who are mapping personal, business and social connections in order to deliver solutions for our clients. It’s our job to figure out complex problems and scenarios, sometimes without full information and/or access to the right people or resources.
That’s the role of the storyteller, to bridge worlds and make connections, even when we ourselves are under deadlines and constraints. Therefore, there’s great value in communications work, especially into the future as our biggest social and organizational challenges will continue to require group-based solutions.
I’d like to thank fellow IABC communicators that I’ve adjudicated and connected with. It’s a very warm and supportive community!
We thank Gord for taking the time to share his remarkable story with us and deeply congratulate him on his three Gold Quill Awards in 2024! To learn more about the Gold Quill Awards, please click here.
