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 920 including guidelines and resource box. Robert A. Kelly © 2004. Why Do You Want PR?
To get someone’s name in
newspaper or a product mention on a radio talk show?
If that’s all you expect, fine. But that response tells me that, as a business, non-profit or association manager, you may have overlooked an important reality: people act on their own perception of facts, leading to predictable behaviors about which something can be done on your behalf.
And you may be compounding that error by failing to insist that your department, division or subsidiary PR people make this very special effort: create, change or reinforce perceptions of those external audiences whose behaviors really DO impact your unit.
If true, it means you don’t have a proactive public relations plan that targets kind of stakeholder behavior change that leads directly to achieving your operating objectives.
Still, I’ll bet you’d like to do everything you can to help your unit’s PR team persuade your important outside stakeholders to your way of thinking. Especially so when such a program works to move those stakeholders to behaviors that lead to success of YOUR department and YOUR programs.
Well, there’s still time to fix things.
Sit down with public relations people assigned to your unit and make certain whole team buys into why it’s so important to know how your outside audiences perceive your operations, products or services. Be sure they accept reality that perceptions usually morph into behaviors that can hurt your unit.
Explore with them how you will monitor and gather perceptions by questioning members of your most important outside audience: how much do you know about our organization? Have you had prior contact with us and were you pleased with interchange? How much do you know about our services or products and people? Have you experienced problems with our people or procedures?
Of course, you can always engage survey pros to round up these data for you, but that can be expensive. Besides, remember that your very own PR team is already in perception and behavior game and could be of use for this opinion monitoring project.
Regardless of who interacts with members of your target audience, questioners must stay alert to false assumptions, unfounded rumors, inaccuracies, misconceptions and untruths.
Here you must be cautious because perception information you gather helps you set a specific public relations goal. For example, clarify misconception, spike that rumor, or correct false assumption.
You pursue that goal by picking right strategy from three choices available to you. Change existing perception, create perception where there may be none, or reinforce it. Be certain, however, that strategy you choose is an obvious fit with your new public relations goal.
