Public Relations - Always Have a Plan

If you are going to run a successful business, you must manage your business imagine and reputation through public relations. Instead of winging it, you need a plan.

Although there are many ways to construct a good PR plan for your organization, there are four essential elements that form a basic outline of any strategy. The first is to determine where you are at this time. The second is to define where you want to go in the future. The third suggests the way you can get to where you want to go. The fourth and final step is measuring your results.

It is important to completely understand the public relations image of your organization at the present time. This is always the first step of the public relations plan. It calls for a very detailed and honest assessment of the current perception of the target audience toward the organization. This perception might be negative, or it could be highly positive, but it is important to understand exactly what it is at the current time.

The second part of the public relations plan is to define where you want to go. It calls for the establishment of a PR goal for the organization. Of course, this goal is dependent on the perception determined in part one. If the organizations image is bad, the goal is to make it good. If the image is good already, the goal is to make it even better. Even if the image is perceived to be as good as it could possibly be, the goal would be to maintain it.

The third part is the most detailed. Up to this point the plan has been like tracing two points on a map. The first is where you are and the second is where you want to go. Now, you must determine the methods that can be used to make the journey from one point to the next. In many ways, this is the most critical part of the plan. It requires that methods and policies must be instituted that will serve to accomplish the goals.

The final part of the plan is the one that is most often overlooked. This is a very critical step in the process. You must have a way of measuring the success of the steps taken in part three to reach the desired goal. These measurements must be unbiased and accurate. It is not enough to guess at this stage. Surveys are one example of the kind of measuring tools that can be utilized. The plan identifies where you are, where you want to go, how you will get there, and then finishes by determining if you have made it.