Six Months Leading PRII: Laura Wall’s 100 Meetings, Three Strategic Bets, and One Uncomfortable Question

Mike Klein:

When job offers started arriving while Laura Wall was at Cannes Lions six months ago, she faced a choice that gave her genuine pause. Trade 18 years of agency creative work for leading a membership organization through transformation? The juxtaposition was stark.

“It was a real juxtaposition,” Wall recalls. “That brand creative life I was living, and then thinking about stepping into a CEO role of a membership organization. Very different worlds. I wondered if I’d miss the creative element.”

She doesn’t. Six months into her tenure as CEO of the Public Relations Institute of Ireland (PRII), Wall is unequivocal: “I absolutely love this job. I didn’t know how much I’d love it.”

But what she’s discovered is more complex than a successful career transition. PRII is facing pressures that mirror those confronting communications professional bodies globally – pressures around relevance, identity, and whether membership organizations built for yesterday’s profession can deliver value to tomorrow’s practitioners.

The 100-Meeting Listening Tour

Wall describes her first four months as “my listening era” – over 100 meetings with members and non-members. The caffeine intake was considerable. The feedback was clear.

“People wanted a less transactional membership body and a much more engaging network,” Wall explains. “A lot of people felt we hadn’t gotten back to where we were pre-COVID.”

From those conversations, Wall distilled three strategic priorities that now frame every decision: modernization, radical collaboration, and community. Each addresses a specific pressure point, and each requires execution rather than just strategy.

The community piece is straightforward – more in-person events, senior networking opportunities, rebuilding the connective tissue that atrophied during COVID and never fully regenerated. Wall has already delivered PRII’s first Fellows Forum, gathering the institute’s most senior practitioners for substantive discussion rather than ceremonial recognition.

Radical collaboration offers an opportunity to bring greater alignment across Ireland’s communications ecosystem, where a number of associations and institutes are working to support the profession. In recent months, conversations have begun across parts of the sector to explore how organisations with shared interests might work more closely together in support of the profession. Whether this evolves into deeper collaboration or new forms of partnership remains to be seen, but there is a growing sense that by working together we can strengthen the collective impact of the work being done.

The modernization imperative is where things get complicated.

The Terminology Gap

Strong Advocacy for the Profession

While navigating internal transformation, Wall has found herself defending the profession publicly. In January, she wrote to the Irish Times editor after what she saw as an unfair portrayal of communications work. More recently, she sent a letter to the Daily Mail after they reduced government communications departments to “spin doctors” whose only function is propaganda.

“They basically said the only function of the communications department is to tell everyone what a great job the government is doing, which is just totally untrue,” Wall explains. “The communication function in government is to help communicate significant policy changes, to help people know what’s happening in their country.”

This defensive posture isn’t unique to Ireland – media criticism of communications work is a global pattern. But for a new CEO to be spending time on letters to editors suggests the profession’s legitimacy problem demands active response, not just strategic patience.

The question is whether these are battles worth fighting, or whether communications practitioners need to demonstrate value that makes the criticism irrelevant.

Human After All

PRII’s annual conference moved from November to May 14 at Croke Park – partly to rebalance an activity-heavy final quarter, partly to create momentum earlier in the year. The theme is “Human After All,” borrowed from Daft Punk.

“It’s looking at the role of humans in communications in this AI moment,” Wall explains. “The conversation is about AI right now, and it’s examining the human role in communications and how progress is still driven by people.”

Every professional association is grappling with AI’s implications for member roles and value. The conference theme speaks to real anxieties. The harder question – one Wall may be building toward – is whether communications work can demonstrate measurable impact rather than hide behind engagement metrics and sentiment surveys.

AI doesn’t threaten communications because it can write press releases. It threatens communications because it exposes how much traditional work was activity-based rather than outcome-based. If PRII’s conference can shift conversation from “humans matter” to “here’s how communications practitioners drive organizational decisions and operational performance,” it would be addressing the actual modernization challenge.

Managing Transformation While Building Foundations

Wall is pragmatic about PRII’s global ambitions. While maintaining connections to the Global Alliance and engaging with UK counterparts, her focus remains domestic.

“My focus is Ireland, to get the essential work on our strategy done here first, and then the global conversation will follow,” she says. “I think we have to stay focused on our membership here.”

This isn’t insularity – it’s recognition that you can’t export what you haven’t built at home. PRII needs to solve its own relevance problem before it can claim broader influence.

The three strategic priorities – modernization, radical collaboration, community – provide a framework. The execution will determine whether they’re sufficient to close the gap between what PRII offers and what members need.

Wall brings genuine enthusiasm to the role, intellectual honesty about the challenges, and willingness to tackle uncomfortable questions including whether PRII’s own name makes sense. She spent her listening era actually listening rather than selling predetermined solutions.

Six months in, the listening has given way to action. Whether that action is sufficient to address structural pressures facing professional membership bodies – or whether Wall is managing a more fundamental transition – remains the open question.

But she’s asking the right questions and executing with energy. That’s further than most membership body leaders get. And for a profession facing its own velocity and relevance challenges, having someone at the helm of a major institute who’s willing to confront rather than deflect uncomfortable realities is worth something.

The 44% versus 4.5% statistic isn’t the whole story. It’s one data point in a larger transformation. Wall seems to understand that the work isn’t just rebranding or strategic planning – it’s rebuilding trust and delivering tangible value to practitioners navigating significant pressure.

As she puts it: “I absolutely love the PR and communications industry. To represent members working in this space – the more I thought about it, the more it was something that excited me.”

Six months in, the excitement appears genuine. Whether it translates into transformation that members can feel rather than just strategic plans they can read will define Wall’s tenure. But the foundation she’s building – grounded in real feedback, unafraid of difficult questions, focused on execution – suggests PRII is in capable hands for whatever comes next.

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Mike Klein is Editor-in-Chief of Strategic.