The 2011 IR Best Practice awards were held at the Tower of London on 22 November, on the occasion of the IR Society’s annual dinner for members. The event, which was attended by some 450 IR professionals and guests, recognised companies and advisers who have produced the best reports, websites and IR strategy in 2011.  The host was Scottish comedian Fred MacAulay. Silverdart designed a range of material for the event.  To find out more about the IR Society visit the website at www.irs.org.uk.

Managing projects is one of the key tasks of any business executive - and finance professionals play a crucial role. The June 2011 special report for the ICAEW’s F&M Faculty examines in depth the various aspects of project management, from useful tools, to team-building and oversight - with further reading and web links. For information about the faculty, see here - for more on F&M, see here.

The 2011 Cheltenham Literature Festival featured the Silverdart publication Our Common Ground at a poetry-reading event on October 12. This anthology celebrating farming and rural life was published in association with the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester and has a foreword by HRH the Prince of Wales. It features around 100 poets, ancient and modern, including three poets who read at Cheltenham: Mario Petrucci, Alison Brackenbury and James Simpson. For more, see here.  For information about the College, see www.rac.ac.uk.

Silverdart designed and built an online educational bookstore for the international bookseller Mallory International during the summer of 2011.

This store, available only to Mallory’s many schools and university customers in Africa, contains 23,000 titles. Silverdart developed the site using ExpressionEngine CMS. The site, which includes ‘browse’, ‘search’ and ‘order’ functionality, has been well received and promises to speed up the company’s international schools supply business. For more on Mallory, see here.

As well as doing their job excellently, finance professionals need to be seen to be doing their job excellently. The September 2011 issue of Finance & Management, the monthly magazine of the ICAEW’s F&M Faculty, explains how to market the finance role within the organisation. Other articles look at ‘Post-acquisition planning’, ‘The art of segmentation’ and ‘Is social media peaking?’, plus more. For information about the faculty, see here - for more on F&M, see here.