OCTA Awarded Top Honor From World’s Largest P.R. Organization

Communications work honored for navigating the bus strike

ORANGE — The Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) was awarded the prestigious national Silver Anvil Award from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) for its issues-management work during a bus strike last summer.

The national awards program selected OCTA as a finalist for its outreach work to bus riders, quick responses to the news media covering the strike, proactive communications with major stakeholders and deploying OCTA employees as ambassadors to provide much-needed information to the public.

Judges selected OCTA as the recipient because of its superior work in navigating the complexities of a work stoppage when 200,000 daily bus customers were stranded without transportation after 1,100 bus drivers went on a 10-day strike.

“OCTA’s superb planning, excellent execution and impressive results during this highly sensitive time qualified it for this honor,” said Donald Kirchoffner, the head judge and a PRSA fellow who runs a consulting firm in Denver. “In all my years of judging crisis communications and issues management, this program really stood out as one of the best public relations programs I’ve seen in a long time.”

OCTA was one of a handful of organizations in Southern California named a finalist by PRSA, the world’s largest association for communications professionals. The Silver Anvil Award is given to the nation’s most strategic, creative and best public relations programs in the industry. OCTA competed with other businesses, agencies, governments and nonprofit organizations across the country for the profession’s most-coveted honor. Winners were announced at an awards presentation in New York City June 5.

This is the second straight year that OCTA was named a Silver Anvil finalist. Last year, OCTA won an Award of Excellence for its community relations work for the Garden Grove Freeway (SR-22) widening project.