Public Relations Practice and Strategies to Proactively Manage Activity

Public relations is believed to be one of the critical strategic tools used by an organization to help it achieve its objectives. Although public relations is a diverse profession in which practitioners deal with a range of issues for a range of organizations, the commonality still exists, eg. codes of practice, theories, communication tools, etc. After reading the chapters, I understand why there is more and more companies recruiting PR practitioners. :) Let's see how effective PR is.

There are categories of public relations effectiveness

1. Work practices and approach - responsibility, commitment, teamwork spirit, etc.

2. Skills, abilities, and knowledge - Advisable, good knowledge, technical ability, etc.

3. Experience and background - solid experience, track record, sound journalism experience, etc.

4. Personal attributes - high professionalism, people oriented, genuine, creative, etc.

5. Judgement and ethics - honest, ethical, integrity, etc.

6. Relationship with management - accepted by management, seen by management as contributing to organizational goals, etc.

7. Image and reputation - good reputation, well known, high credibility and acceptance.

8. Works for the profession - building the profession, protecting the reputation of the profession, etc.

The public relations role in different types of organizations

Nowadays, PR appears to be important in many organizations, not only corporate sector but also not-for-profit organizations. Each type of organization have its own advantages and disadvantages within which PR people work. For me, if I had a chance to choose, I would choose to work for a non-for-profit organization for few years before thinking to work for a company. IN NFP organizations, PR practitioners have a chance to improve their creativity and learning skills to organize events within a low budget. I think it's quite interesting.

Day-to-day challenges and pressures

• Good relationships: need to develop good relationships with workmates, managers, etc.
• Good process: every practitioner develops process and frameworks for their activity. The aim of the system and process is to achieve good consistent result every time.
• Time management
• Effective budgeting: the demand from manager and client for maximum results within a given budget.
• Keep good record
• Being proactive rather than reactive
• Keeping clients and managers happy: the best way is to achieve the planned results and to come in on time and on budget.
• Building and maintaining good networks because it will affect our practice
• keeping up with changes, especially advanced technology.
• understanding the contribution of research

Strategy in Public relations

What is strategy? Strategy is central to the role and function of public relations.The strategic contribution of public relations practitioners develops problem-solving for the entire organization by working with other departments and coordinating problem-solving activities.

What public relations strategy can achieve

How to develop a strategy? To do so, a PR person need to do a range of activities including research, analysis, goal setting, setting objectives, identifying publics and audiences, developing strategies, devising and implementing tactics, monitoring and evaluation.

• Research: Research is the process of symmetrically gathering information that will provide the basis to establish an understanding of situations and issues and make sense of them
• Analysis: Identifying Strengths, Weakness, Opportunity and Threats (SWOT)
• Goal setting: Identifying what need to be achieved based on situational analysis
• Setting objectives: Objectives should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Result-oriented, and in Timeframe (SMART objectives)
• Identifying publics and audiences: knowing who we are dealing with
• Developing strategy: planning strategies and tactics in ways that will result in your audience constructing only the intended meaning, not other meanings.
• Tactics: how public relations work gets done and tactics are often seen as the bread and butter skills of public relations
• Monitoring and evaluation: to know whether the goal was achieved, whether the strategies and tactics were effective.

Example of a good plan PR campaign

http://www.lib.uts.edu.au/gta/?page=show&id=550

This was a PR campaign conducted in 2005 with a good plan where research, analysis, goal, objectives, audiences, strategy, tactics, and evaluations were clearly identified.