Unit 3:

Public Relations Planning

 Public Relations functions
• Press relations or press agency: Creating and placing
newsworthy information in the news media to attract attention to
a person, product, or service.
• Product publicity: Publicizing specific products.
• Public affairs: Building and maintaining national or local
community relationships.
• Lobbying: Building and maintaining relationships with
legislators and government officials to influence legislation and
regulation.
• Investor relations: Maintaining relationships with shareholders
and others in the financial community.
• Development: Working with donors or members of nonprofit
organizations to gain financial or volunteer support.
 Major Public Relations Tools
• Public relations uses several tools.
• News. find or create favorable news about the company/products/
people. Sometimes occur naturally; sometimes through events/activities.
• Speeches executives must field questions from the media or give talks at
trade associations or sales meetings, and these events can either build or
hurt the company’s image.
• Special events, ranging from news conferences, press tours, grand
openings, and fireworks displays to laser light shows, hot air balloon
releases, multimedia presentations, or educational programs designed to
reach and interest target publics.
• Written materials to reach and influence their target markets (materials
include annual reports, brochures, articles, and company newsletters and
magazines.)
• Audiovisual materials, such as slide-and-sound programs, DVDs, and
online videos are being used increasingly as communication tools.
• Corporate identity materials can also help create a
corporate identity that the public immediately recognizes.
Logos, stationery, brochures, signs, business forms,
business cards, buildings, uniforms, and company cars
and trucks—all become marketing tools when they are
attractive, distinctive, and memorable.
• Public service activities.by contributing money and time
to can improve public goodwill
• The Web is also an increasingly important PR channel.
Web sites, blogs, and social networks such as YouTube,
Facebook, and Twitter are providing interesting new ways
to reach more people.
 Developing Public Relations Plan
• This process is primarily composed of four steps: using research to
define the problem or situation, developing objectives and strategies that
address the situation, implementing the strategies, and then measuring
the results of the public relations efforts. RACE (research, action
planning, communication, evaluation) or ROPE (research, objectives,
programming, evaluation),
1. Use research to analyze the situation (problem or opportunity) facing the
organization and to accurately define in such a way that the PR efforts can
successfully address the cause of the issue, not just its symptoms.
2. Develop a strategic action plan that addresses the issue includes having
an overall goal, measurable objectives, clearly identified publics, targeted
strategies, and effective tactics.
3. Execute the plan with communication tools and tasks that contribute to
reaching the objectives.
4. Measure whether you were successful in meeting the goals using
evaluation tools.
Defining PR Problem/Opportunity and Issues
• Step 1: Formative Research to Analyze the Situation
• The first step in the process is analyzing the problem or opportunity.
This involves research, either formal or informal, to gather
information that best describes what is going on.
• Research used to understand the situation and help formulate strategies
is called formative research.
• research “is the systematic gathering of information to describe and
understand situations and check out assumptions about publics and
public relations consequences.”Cutlip, Center, and Broom (2006).
• Much of this information may already exist and may have been
collected by other agencies. Research that has previously been
conducted is called secondary research.
 Action Planning
Step 2. Set the Goals and Objective
• be focused on resolving or capitalizing on the situation identified in the
problem/opportunity statement.
• begins by flipping the problem/ opportunity statement into a goal and
suggest that the public will do something you want them to do.
• Because publics cannot actually be controlled, it might blame
organization for failure.
• Instead, focus should be on what can be done to achieve the goal, such as
act accordingly and communicate that gets the endorsement of publics.
• The goal provides the direction for the strategic plan and objectives
provide the direction of specific and measurable outcomes necessary.
• A good objective meets the following criteria: it should be an end and
not a means to the end; it should be measurable; it should have a time
frame; and it should identify the public for the intended outcome.
 Criteria for good objectives
• It should be an end and not a means to the end;. An objective should be an outcome
that contributes to the goal. There are three possible outcomes for these objectives:
 cognitive (awareness, understanding, remembering),
 attitudinal (create attitudes, reinforce positive attitudes, change negative attitudes),
and
 behavior (create behaviors, reinforce positive behaviors, change negative behaviors).
There is a hierarchy three different levels of objectives: outputs, outtakes, and outcomes

 Output Objectives). which are the means to an end, include the communication
efforts to reach the objectives and are actually strategies and not objectives.
 Outtake objectives are focused on increasing awareness, understanding, and retention
of the key message points. It is far more important to know that the audience received
the message than whether it was sent out..
 Outcome objectives are perhaps the most important, but also the most difficult to
achieve. There is a diffusion process that occurs with adoption of this behavior
The objectives should advance overall business goals such as increase sales, increase
share values, retain employees, improve social responsibility, or reduce litigation. They
should also be written within the parameters of possible public relations outcomes.
 Criteria for good objectives Contd….
• Measureable. Objectives also help hold public relations professionals
accountable for their efforts. Public relations should engage only in
strategies and tactics that actually contribute to larger organizational
goals. Measurable objectives often require a comparative number. An
objective cannot be set if the current level of awareness is unknown. This
is why formative research is needed to establish benchmarks. If no such
benchmark exists, then it is customary to establish a desired level. The
problem with this is that you do not know how close you are to that figure
before the campaign. This might be an easy objective to achieve if your
level is already at or above or a very difficult one if your level is low.
• Time frame. When will the objective be met? If there is no time frame
specified, then it cannot be accountable.
• Identify the public. It is a good idea to identify overall objectives before
tying them to a public. This helps to think about which publics are
connected to the objective. However, to make an objective truly
measurable it must identify a public, because different publics will be at
Step3: Segment Audiences
• All groups within publics should be differentiated based on common
characteristics such as demographics, geographic, or psychographics.
 Demographics include variables such as gender, income, level of
education, and ethnicity.
 Geographics describe your public by their location.
 Psychographics segment your audience based on their values and
lifestyles.
It is important to segment your key publics because it will help you identify
their self-interests.
Step4: Tie Strategy to Objective
• Too often public relations programs have been primarily tactical and
have skipped the strategic step of creating objectives. Public relations
professionals are doers and often want to get to the action first.
• However, too many tactics have been executed because of tradition (“We
always send out press releases”) than because of strategy.
• What makes public relations strategic is having the action tied to the real
needs of the organization. But if a strategy cannot be tied to an essential
outcome, then it should not be executed.
Step 5:Create Communication Based on Self-Interests
• People pay more attention to communications that are tied to their
values, needs, and goals.
• Knowing the demographic, geographic, and/or psychographic
differences of key publics, you can create a message that connects
them to your program.
• Once the self-interests have been identified, a primary message can
be created that will give direction to the communication efforts.
These can become slogans if they are clever and effective enough.
• Step5: Choose Communication Channels
• The last element in the strategy is identifying the channel or medium
through which you can reach target publics.
• The channels can be mass media, or other mediated channels such as e-
mail, blogs, or Twitter or can also be town hall meetings, mediated slide
shows, and face-to-face (interpersonal) communication Or group of
people, usually opinion leaders, such as teachers, scientists, doctors, or
other experts.
• Usually the target audience is reached through multiple points of contact
to reinforce the message. Often, there are several strategies for each
public and for each objective.
• The most creative element in the strategic planning stage is the tactic.
Tactics are the specific communication tools and tasks that are used to
execute the strategy. A cardinal rule is to always evaluate your tactics
within established strategies and objectives.
 Communication Implementation
• The best public relations programs include both communication and
action. Sometimes an organization needs to act, or react, before it can
communicate.
• Organizations should not only expect stakeholders to behave in ways
that benefit the organization; sometimes the organization needs to
change its actions and behaviors to improve these critical
relationships.
• Two additional components to the public relations process usually are
developed during the communication and action stage: the planning
calendar and the budget.
• Once the tactics have been determined it is best to plan the
development and execution of the tactics using a calendaring tool
such as a Gantt chart.
• A Gantt chart is a horizontal flow chart that provides a graphic
illustration of when tasks should begin and end in comparison to all
other tasks.
 Evaluation
• four concerns should be addressed when evaluating the effectiveness of a
public relations campaign:
 Define your benchmark.
The benchmark compares your current situation to your past. Paine also
recommends comparing the data gathered to other organizations, such as key
competitors. Comparative analysis makes the data much more relevant.
 Select a measurement tool.
• Based on this evaluation, the tools that will best help measure against stated
criteria are selected. Generally, the same tools that helped establish the
benchmark data are used. Probably the most popular evaluation tools used in
public relations measure the output objectives. There are several ways to
measure the effectiveness of communication output, but some are better than
others.
• One of the earliest methods was clip counting. A clip is an article,
broadcast story, or online message that mentions the company or product.
You can either hire a clipping service or collect your own clips. At the end
of a predetermined period, the number of clips obtained is examined. This
measure is the most simple and convenient way to measure output and is
one way to monitor media coverage. It is also the least informative because
you do not know what the clips mean.
• Many public relations measurement services will analyze media coverage
to evaluate the percentage of articles that contain program key messages10,
the prominence of the message (for a press release, whether it was printed
on page 1 versus page 16; in a broadcast, how much time was allocated to
the story and where it appears in the program), the tone of the message
(positive, neutral, negative), and how the media efforts compare with key
competitors (share of voice).
• However, to know if these communications actually affected people’s
awareness, understanding, attitudes, or behaviors, primary research such as
surveys needs to be conducted.
• Evaluation and measurement should not take place only at the end of
your efforts. You should be monitoring the media constantly to
determine whether your message is available for people to see (what
advertisers call “reach,” public relations professionals call
“opportunities-to-see11,” or OTS). If the media strategy is not
working, course corrections in the middle of the program are required,
not after the program has been completed.
• Although sophisticated measures of communication output have been
developed over the years, it is still more critical to consider the outtake
and outcomes of those messages. Getting the communication into
various channels, be they traditional or new media, is only the means
to the end of affecting attitudes, opinions, and behaviors. The
outcomes need to be measured in order to tie back to organizational
goals and purposes.
• To measure attitudes and opinions, the most popular tool remains
the survey. Public opinion polls and attitude surveys can be
conducted and compared to benchmarks to determine whether the
messages and behaviors of an organization have had the intended
effect. Intentions to behave and preferences for purchasing can
also be measured through surveys, providing some figures on
people’s inclinations.
• Behaviors can also be measured against benchmarks. Often the
connection between communication strategy and behavioral
changes could be due to other variables, so it is important to
isolate and track the impact of the public relations efforts in order
to evaluate whether they are the driving force in the change.
 Analyze data, draw actionable conclusions, and make
recommendations.
 Make changes and measure again.