Amandine Combe
Communications and Marketing Manager, EA

Each year, on June 9^th, World Accreditation Day (WAD) takes place. This event is a great opportunity to widely promote accreditation, accredited conformity assessment and standards, and is celebrated in over 100 economies around the world.

In the European co-operation for Accreditation (EA), we promoted WAD by publishing a dedicated article on our website, the literature prepared by IAF and ILAC, and several tweets on our Twitter account (which has over 3,000 followers) from February onwards. We also sent a newsletter on June 9^th to our 1,000 subscribers.

EA Members were actively involved in promoting WAD 2020. Here are some examples:

ACCREDIA (the Italian National Accreditation Body [NAB])

To celebrate WAD 2020, which was dedicated to food safety, Accredia sent a special newsletter to more than 10,000 users to promote the initiative and disseminate Italian data on agri-food; planned a social media campaign reaching over 3,000 Twitter followers, about 18,000 LinkedIn followers and around 1,200 FB followers; and disseminated IAF and ILAC videos and materials through its digital channels, YouTube and its website.

ENAC (the Spanish NAB)

ENAC delivered information and communication materials to several Spanish newspapers and magazines in order to emphasize the added value of accreditation and accredited organizations in improving food safety. For instance, the ENAC Head of the Agrifood Department and newly appointed member of The Global Food Safety Initiative’s stakeholders forum, Elisa Gredilla, gave an interview to Agricultura magazine in which she pointed out the essential role of accredited certification in reducing the possibilities of providing a defective food item and increasing global food safety.

INAB (the Irish NAB)

INAB prepared the publication ‘Accreditation – Ensuring the Safety and Quality of Food’; conducted a social media campaign leading up to June 9^th, when they outlined how three specific conformity assessment bodies support food safety; and promoted WAD in the INAB newsletter and Health and Safety Authority newsletter. The literature prepared by ILAC and IAF was included in their announcements.

NA (the Norwegian NAB)

On its website, NA published an interview in which the Director of Norwegian Accreditation and the Director of the Norwegian Food Safety Authority discussed the importance of food safety and accreditation. The articles are available in Norwegian here and here.

NA also published the video and joint statement from ILAC and IAF on their website, and presented an article written by professionals in NA on the same topic. The article in Norwegian can be found here.

PCA (the Polish NAB)

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, PCA, like other institutions in the country and in the world, had to adapt its communication activities to the new situation. PCA gave up on previously planned conferences, meetings with a large group of interested parties and moved all their activities online. In their informational and promotional activities, PCA focused on showing the role of accreditation in ensuring public health and safety, which is especially important in times of crisis. The subject of this year’s WAD 2020, Accreditation: Improving food safety, turned out to be extremely close to this idea. As part of promotional activities related to WAD, PCA published information on social media and their website, including the IAF/ILAC brochure, an infographic, and the IAF/ILAC video with Polish language subtitles. A specially designed slider redirected viewers to a subpage dedicated to WAD 2020. In addition, PCA conducted an information campaign in the media – the press release was sent to all major portals and media, including sector specific media. Also, an article on WAD 2020 was published in the June issue of PCA’s periodic publication ‘PCA Info – events, opinions, prospects’.

UKAS (the UK NAB)

UKAS posted a news article about food safety for WAD and ran a webinar on the importance of accreditation and standards in food and farming.