VPC’s fall meeting brought together nearly 40 members and guests for a wonderful day of networking, learning, laughing and growing personally and professionally. Keynote speaker Dean Browell, an international expert on consumer behavior with Feedback agency, offered a workshop geared toward any communications professional. Major takeaways from his presentation...
Read More
Bonnie Atwood was named runner-up for the 2016 Communicator of Achievement Award given by the National Federation of Press Women. She was recognized during the organization’s annual conference, held in Wichita, Kansas. The Communicator of Achievement Award is the highest honor bestowed by NFPW upon those members who have distinguished themselves within and...
Read More
A big bumblebee weighing 60 pounds, a dramatic dragonfly with a three-and-a-half-foot wingspan and a soaring seven-foot-tall red rose: these are just a few of the sculptures on display at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden as part of Nature Connects®: Art with LEGO® Bricks. Created with half-a-million LEGO bricks, the award-winning exhibit by New York artist Sean Kenney feature 27 sculptures in 14 displays throughout the garden.
Learn about the joys and challenges of LEGOs and the branding and communications plans at 5:45 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 18. Beth Monroe, director of public relations for Lewis Ginter, will lead VPC members on a 30-minute tour. Following the tour, tables have been reserved for members to enjoy Flowers After 5 featuring Cook County Bluegrass. For almost two decades Cook County Bluegrass has been providing good times and bluegrass music to the Richmond area and are guaranteed to provide a foot stomping good time!
VPC members should arrive by 5:30 p.m. to the Visitor Center and pay their admission ($13 regular admission, $11 senior admission or free for LGBG members). The tour begins promptly at 5:45 p.m.
Please RSVP to Cynthia Price at cynthiapricecp@gmail.com by Monday, Aug. 15.
Read More
Kayla Solsbak, a sophomore at the University of Richmond, is the recipient of the Virginia Press Women Foundation’s 2016 Agnes Cooke Scholarship. She was announced as this year’s scholarship winner at the annual conference of Virginia Professional Communicators, with which the foundation is affiliated, at the George Washington Inn in Winchester, Virginia, on Friday,...
Read MoreMonday, Feb. 1: Final deadline for entering for the VPC Communications Contest. Visit the NFPW website and enter the all-electronic 2016 professional communicators competition for statewide recognition and the chance to compete against pros in the national contest. The website provides complete instructions.
Members of Virginia Professional Communicators AND professional communicators who live or work in Virginia are eligible to enter. If you are not a member of VPC, and you win first place at the state level, you will be given the option to join VPC and NFPW so that your entry can move to the national level to be judged. Work published from Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 2015, is eligible for this year’s contest.
Read More
By Sue Brinkerhoff Bland Last night, I watched one of the most amazing soccer tournaments ever played. Today, I read our local sports pages with the hope of reliving some of the fantastic moments I witnessed in the U.S. v Japan Women’s World Cup Soccer event. Ironically, our American women competed and won the world title the day after Independence Day. We...
Read More
Gail Kent, President: I was so excited and expectant in planning VPC’s first strategic planning retreat, not exactly sure would come from the experience, but feeling that if we made a space for magic, it might just happen, and it did. Members of the board spent a weekend in March examining our organization to determine what is working, what is not and how we...
Read More
By Martha Steger At Iceland’s Blue Lagoon this past September the geothermal pool’s green-blue, misty warmth enveloped me. Soothed, I looked out over permafrost in the distance and pondered the erupting Bardarbunga volcano far away in central Iceland — venting lava and fumes in earnest for a month. As neat as the exotic locale was, I decided it didn’t have...
Read MoreVirginia Professional Communicators members are invited to submit work produced during the 2014 calendar year for the 2015 VPC Communications Contest, an online electronic communication contest. The contest is open to non-members as well. To enter the contest, go to http://NFPW.org/CommunicationsContest.cfm. The new web page provides links for navigation...
Read MoreBy Martha Steger Journalism groups as well as other organizations were quick to jump on the “Je Sui Charlie” bandwagon after the Charlie Hebdo tragedy. When I received a mass-distributed NFPW email seeking signatures for a freedom-of-speech (including freedom from self-censoring) message, I immediately thought of NFPW members (including a lot of us in VPC) who...
Read More