Strategic Objective 6
Profile:
‘To raise the perception of the Institute and the profession’
Chartered Accountant of the Year Awards
Institute Centenary
The centenary is being celebrated in calendar year 2008, so the first six months of the centenary coincided with the last six months of the financial year 2008.
Centenary website
For the centenary year, the Institute maintained a website at www.nzicacentenary.com. This went live on 15 January 2008 and members were told about it via the weekly e-newsletter on the same day. Members have contributed stories and photographs, and stories about branch and national events have also been loaded onto the site.
Branch and national events
Between 1 January 2008 and 30 June 2008, celebrations of the centenary were held at the following branch events:
April:
Wellington: Retired members’ lunch and Fellows centenary cocktail evening
Hawke’s Bay: Fellowship presentation
National: 30,000th member celebrations
Otago: Retired members lunch
May:
Auckland: Retired members' lunch
Waikato/BOP: Fellowship centennial dinner and annual awards dinner
Canterbury-Westland: Cocktail function
Gisborne: Branch dinner
June:
United Kingdom: Black tie dinner
Media coverage
The 30,000th member celebration and branch events in Otago, Waikato and Gisborne all received coverage in local media.
Journal articles
The following articles have been published in the Journal:
• Accountants in history series: each issue since February 2008
• February 2008: A hundred years young
• March 2008: All in the family – on the books since 1909
• April 2008: Down memory lane
• May 2008: Lucky 30,000
• June 2008: A world record? Three generations, 108 years
Media/Communications
Over the reporting period, the Institute has been positively reported in the print media on more than 225 occasions. Staff or office bearers have been quoted 55 times, and articles about or by members, mentioning their designation, have appeared 524 times.
The unit has released 51 unique media releases, of which 44 have been published.
There have also been four television and six radio interviews with staff or office bearers.
There have been 15 approaches to Media/Comms by media for comment since January 2008, as well as approaches directly to spokespeople. (As spokespeople do not always advise Media/Comms of approaches, the total number of approaches is not known.)
E-newsletters
42 e-newsletters have been sent to members since the first weekly publication in August 2007. This has enabled a reduction in the number of emails sent to members each week from up to six, with an average of three, to a maximum of five with an average of three per week.
The e-newsletter audience is 81% and the average number opening each email is 27.17%.
Annual Report Awards
The Annual Report Awards is an external competition, run annually at a national level. Winners are announced around the end of June each year at a presentation dinner.
The awards encourage excellence in the presentation of information in annual reporting. This year, the overall quality of entrants has improved markedly compared to previous years and the number of entries has increased significantly. The increase in quality shows that the awards are meeting their goal of raising the standard of reporting in New Zealand.
This year we presented 13 awards, including special categories for sustainability and governance reporting, and a Supreme Award for the overall best report. The Supreme Award winner for 2008 was the Wellington City Council. The judges commented that Wellington City Council has taken local authority annual reporting to a new benchmark.
Chartered Accountant of the Year Awards
The purpose of the awards is to recognise the achievements and excellence of Accounting Technicians, Associate Chartered Accountants, and young Chartered Accountants. In 2008, the Associate Chartered Accountant of the Year award has been introduced due to the reopening of the Associate Chartered Accountants College.
The Chartered Accountants of the Year Awards is also a mechanism to raise the profile of the Institute and the attributes of these members. The 2007 Young Chartered Accountant of the year winner was Leonard Gardner. Sheryl Hunter was named Accounting Technician of the year. Leonard and Sheryl are profiled in this annual report.