Beckman Foundation Wins 2024 PROTOS Award of Excellence for Community Relations / Institutional Programs
Public Relations Campaign Supported Foundation’s Multi-year Study Published by eLife Sciences
IRVINE, Calif. (Sept. 30, 2024) – The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation announced today a PROTOS Award of Excellence from the Orange County Public Relations Society of America (OCPRSA) was awarded to Curator and Communications Officer Kaerie Ray in the Community Relations/Institutional Programs category. A months-long public relations campaign generated awareness for and boosted engagement with the Foundation’s multi-year study on the impact of blinded reviews on reducing institutional prestige bias, published earlier in the year by eLife Sciences. The PROTOS Awards honor Orange County’s top public relations professionals who use the highest standards of communications practices to develop and implement exceptional programs and campaigns.
““It is exciting to receive this recognition on the importance of the [eLife] article from a professional society. Congratulations to Kaerie Ray for this recognition of her coordination with our partners and distillation of the complex concepts in the article into engaging and insightful posts to communicate the positive message of progress in reducing bias in our selection processes.”
OCPRSA announced awardees last Thursday evening during a ceremony at its annual awards gala. The Community Relations/Institutional Programs category represents full public relations programs “aimed at winning the cooperation of, and improving relations with, people or organizations in communities in which the sponsoring organization has an interest, need or opportunity. Includes programs affecting an organization’s overall relations with its publics or key elements of its publics, including multicultural and global communications.”
Beckman Foundation’s eight-year study explored the award outcomes of 2,291 grant applicants to its young investigator program. A comparison was made between applicant groups based on the introduction of a blinding (anonymization) requirement, a step applied to the technical proposal that involved omitting name, gender, gender-identifying pronouns, and institutional information in the technical proposal of the initial Letter of Intent. The study found that the blinded reviews resulted in a 30 percent reduction in awards issued to applicants from Top 25 institutions. The public relations campaign included website content, media kit, press announcement, key messages, social media graphics with captions and hashtags, earned and contributed articles, frequently asked questions, pull quotes, and other supplemental materials.
““This campaign was designed to spotlight Beckman Foundation’s thought leadership on equitable and inclusive funding practices, to share actionable steps for grant review process improvement, and to drive conversation toward reducing institutional prestige bias. One of the primary methods for achieving these goals was to generate views and downloads of the eLife article, and we’re delighted to have engaged the scientific and philanthropic communities so successfully, and to have those efforts honored by OCPRSA.”
This is the first PROTOS entry and first award for Beckman Foundation and Kaerie Ray.
About the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation
Located in Irvine, California, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation supports researchers and nonprofit research institutions in making the next generation of breakthroughs in chemistry and the life sciences. Founded in 1977 by 20th century scientific instrumentation pioneer Dr. Arnold O. Beckman, the Foundation supports United States institutions and young scientists whose creative, high-risk, and interdisciplinary research will lead to innovations and new tools and methods for scientific discovery. For more information, visit beckman-foundation.org.
About Kaerie Ray, MBA, PMP
Kaerie joined the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation in 2017 and serves as Curator and Communications Officer. Previously, she worked as Director of Development & Communications with a foundation providing medical treatment grants and college scholarships for student-patients. She received her MBA from Western Governors University, BA from Vanguard University of Southern California, and graduate certificates in Museum Studies and Curation from Northwestern University and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, respectively. Kaerie is a member of PRSA, OC PRSA, AASLH, and SCA, and earned PMP certification in 2024.
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Press Contact - Beckman Foundation:
Kaerie Ray, Curator & Communications Officer
949-560-4232
General Contact - OCPRSA:
