Week 10

This weeks readings are chapters 7 'Strategy, planning and scheduling' and 8 'Tactics' from the course text 'Public Relations - Theory and Practice' by Jane Johnston and Clara Zawawi. I think these chapters were really important to the development of an understanding of the practice of public relations. The important points from chapter seven include:

• Strategy is "...a series of planned activities designed and intergrated to achieve a stated organisational goal."


• A public relations strategy is defined as a "...process by which the leadership of an organisation deliberately manages its communications proactively so that they are open, candid and primarily focused on the marketplace and the customer as the first cause." Public relations campaigns are proactive.


• The first tactic is internal, pr practitioners first need to educate their management and CEO about the value of strategic public relations. This will involve becoming directly involved with communication with top management or being part of the governing board. The priority of the operation is to communicate to the public.


• A survey conducted by Professor James Grunig found that in "...a typical public relations department provided an average 185 per cent return on investment to the organisation. The return was even higher - about 300 per cent on investment - when the chief executive officer (CEO) supported a well-performing public relations department." I feel that this is evidence enough that through careful strategic planning for a campaign, investing in a public relations practitioner can really help an organisations development and profit generation.


• The PR practitioner needs to be informed about the mission, values, direction and objectives of an organisation prior to creating the campaign.


• The vision statement (describing the "...future state of the organisation at a selected time." It is ideally developed through group participation.) and the mission statement (this assists in closing the gap between the "...unsatisfactory present and the more perfect future." It outlines the broad steps that are suggested that will lead to the creation of the vision)


• Key Performance indicators (KPI's) or key result areas (KRA's) act as measurable indicators of the progress of an organisation towards the goal outlined in their vision statement. They measure the most important performance results, for example profit. These may not be all that useful to public relations because alot of public relations work is not measurable. They can be used to measure the most quantifiable areas of public relations, for example the number of media releases sent out.


• The 'ten-step strategic communication plan' created by Lester Potter provides the following tep steps for strategic planning; "1/executive summary, 2/the communication process, 3/background, 4/situational analysis, 5/main message statement, 6/stakeholders, 7/messages for key stakeholders, 8/implementation, 9/budget, 10/monitoring and evaluating.


• Budgeting is essential in a pr plan. As stated in the text, McElreath describes bugeting as "...a plan for coordinating resources and expenses over a period of time by assigning costs...to goals and objectives for specific activities." Financial budgeting estimates expenditure and income. Operating budgets estimate the "...costs of the goods and services that the organisation will use for specific purposes..."


• Pr consultancies make money through providing adivse and expertise to their clients. Consultancies are defined as income centers, focusing on profit and income.


• In-house public relations departments are defined as expense centers because they don't need to achieve revenue directly.


• Scheduling is important to the production of a plan. This helps to ensure that the outline of the budget is followed, the tactics for the campaign are implemented in the correct order and at the correct time during the campaign.


• Using lists in a campaign assist in the ordering and motion of the campaigns success. They allow pracititoners to keep ontop of the movement of the plan and helps them avoid letting things slip through the cracks.

I've just noticed that we did this reading earlier on this year so I have already commented about the idea of strategic planning prior to this blog on another post. Yay, I've done it twice now. Atleast it should be well drilled into my skull. Well moving on to a chapter I haven't yet looked at, well atleast I hope I haven't; chapter 8 'tactics'. The points I found to be most important from this chapter included:

• Succesful pr campaigns don't neccessarily involve a broad number of tactic types.


• Tactics are broken up into two groups; controlled (pr practitioner has control over the tactics and the process, eg message creation) and uncontrolled (tactics that can altered or even blocked, eg media relations). It is likely and helpful to choose a variety of controlled and uncontrolled tactics.
• Methods of giving information to a recipient include mail, faxes, news distribution agencies, email, CD-ROMs, couriers, videos, video-conferencing, personal delivery and websites. I think each form of delivery are really inspirational to developing an appropriate method of giving out information to the public and even the media. Although each resource has both negative and positive sides to it, they all provide a positive movement to the motion of a campaign.
• I agree with the text when it states that the internet should be used as a communicative tool to propel the tools already used. I think it is vital to have other forms that will lead to the knowledge of such resources on the internet. For example, a television add may communicate the website that provides further information to propel the organisation. I thought it was good that the text considered both the negative and positive sides to the availability of the internet as a resource. I think that freedom of information on the net would mean that it would be difficult for pr practitioners to accredit their information.
• Research is an important tool/tactic for success.
• The text explores the difficulties of using media relations as a pr tactic. These include the difficulties of having a story that is newsworthy for the organisation, being able to deal with negative responses, the risk that the news message may not always assist the organisation the pr practitioner is working for and some media forms don't offer the space to cover a story completely (for example the radio and the television news).
• Until this chapter I did not realise how important every aspect of adveritising on paper is, including paper size, colours, paper stocks and binding. This suprised me, although it is obvious that particular formatting is important to the development of paper information. I thought it based simply around graphic design, text format and colours.
• As the text states, "Annual reports record the highlights and challenges experiences by an organisation, including financial details, for the financial year." These are required by all public organisations. The annual report can be deemed a critical communication vehicle as it presents the success and development of the organisation. It has become common to post the annual report on the company website as a form of a communication tool.
• Newsleters are an "...ongoing communication, usually aimed at building long-term rapport with a target audience." It facilitates two-way communication through opinion opportunities and competitions. A vertical newsletter is provided throughout an organisation, aimed at all levels of staff. Horizontal newsletters are based towards a readership from a narrow interest group.
• direct mail "...is directed at a specific target audience and demographic group...". I found it interesting that the text stated that "...a campaign will generate a 2-5 per cent response". A piece of direct meal needs to grab the attention of the reader, provide a compelling introductory sentence, ensuring clear information, repeating the offer, compelling action and ensuring easy access to the guarantee/offer. This form of communication has lost ground to the internet.
• Consistency is a key concept in campaign tactics. Each tactic needs to fit together and link like a family. Even those tactics that are different, need to fit into the ultimate scheme and running of the campaign. For example, for documents concerned with the campaign; similar layouts, colour schemes, type font and size, dot point styles, layout, graphics, grammar and icons/graphic design features should be the same to maintain consistency and communicate successfully.
• Branding should be connected to the public relations campaign, similar integrity and positioning should be used for the communicative sources used. The text describes a brand as "...a company wants to be perceived, as communicated through a range of public and internal activities such as its slogan, logo, communication style, company behaviour, culture, products or service pricing." The campaign must be consistent with the image that is intended by the company brand.
• Videos, DVDs and CD-ROMs are used in situations where visuals will give the message more of an impact or where the message involves movement or a "multi-dimensional approach".
• I definetly disagree with the concept that the text explores about photography being the tactic that "'doesn't lie"'. Images are altered to look better, brighter, improve the contrasts, saturation and even cut and move items within the picture. I don't think that photography is any more a reliable objective source as television is. Despite this. photographs can be extremely useful to pr campaigns. The importance of finding a successful and skilled photographer is imense in measuring the success of a campaign. The practitioner needs to deal with copyright laws and the time that the photograph will be under the copyright law. Photographic libraries allow an area where photographs can be brought, instead of relying on your own photographic work. The down side to these is that those photos are available to anyone and may not fit into the style that is dedicated to your particular campaign.
• Speeches are an important skill relying on the skills of a writer and the rhetoric ability of the speaker. "Good speeches are short and to the point." The speech should be written according to the abilities of the speaker, for example in dot points for the confident speaker that can embellish on; or a conversational speach for those that perfer to read a speach then rely on their own memory.
• Presentations allow a number of communication tactics to be implemented. They are used to demonstrate an idea or to provide knowledge or inform a group of people.
• The success of the use of celebrities for public relations campaigns can be summarised by the quote in the text stating that they "...can bring great value through their high public profile, which can cut through communication noise and command immediate attention. Their status also offers implied endorsement of a message so they are often used to spearhead social campaigns...or to endorse products..."
• Advertising is "...one of the most powerful forms of controlled communication, as it uses persuasive messages which can serve as a central pillar for a campaign..." It can be a very targetted and compelling tactic that is extremely effective for pr campaigns. Television is perceived to be the most powerful form for advertising, despite this, it is limited because of time and space constraints.
• Again the text emphasises the importance of sponsorship in the construction of a successful campaign.

The ideas that have really developed my learning about pr from this weeks reading bases around the fact that consistency is necessary in pr campaigns. It is important that pr practitioners create a pattern of tactics that are best suited for that campaigns goals, and that relate to form together. It is also important to note that no mixture of tactics is neccessarily correct. Different mixtures of tactics can be as successful as the next.