Please feel free to publish this article and resource box in your ezine, newsletter, offline publication or website. A copy would be appreciated at bobkelly@TNI.net. Word count is 935 including guidelines and resource box. Robert A. Kelly © 2003. Get Outsiders on Your Side
Especially good advice for business, non-profit and association managers whose job success depends in large part on
behaviors of their key external audiences.
I refer to behaviors like inquiries on increase, new waves of specialized employment applications, more and more followup purchases, new levels of membership queries, a substantial boost in capital donations, or more frequent component specifications by engineering firms.
If you are such a manager, you almost assuredly need help in achieving your unit’s operating objectives. Which is why it’s nice to hear that public relations team assigned to your operation is responsible for providing a large portion of that help.
Two things need to happen to make that a reality. One, it requires more than your oversight. You must stay involved with your public relations folks at every major decision point.
And two, entire effort must be based on more than a casual debate about which communications tactics should be used.
What is needed is your commitment to a fundamental premise that is foundation on which your entire public relations effort will be based. A premise like this: People act on their own perception of facts before them, which leads to predictable behaviors about which something can be done. When we create, change or reinforce that opinion by reaching, persuading and moving-to-desired-action very people whose behaviors affect organization most, public relations mission is accomplished.
With that established, we can get to work on blueprint that will help persuade those important members of your key target audiences to your way of thinking. What you hope for then, is follow on stakeholder actions that result in your success as a business, non-profit or association manager.
Before taking any action steps, you need to know how members of your key target audiences perceive you. So, first, you and your PR team need to list those important outside audiences whose behaviors affect your unit most. Then prioritize them so we can use audience in first place on that list as our target audience for this article.
Instead of spending considerable money on professional survey work, you and your team can interact with members of your target audience and pose a number of questions designed to draw out any perception problems. “Do you know anything about us? Have you had any contacts with our people? Were they satisfactory? Do you have any problems with our services, products or people?”
