How to … Construct a PR Plan
What is PR?
Public Relations (PR) is the discipline that looks after your organisation’s reputation with the aim of earning understanding and supporting and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is a planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and understanding between an organisation and its audiences.
So from this, we can see that PR is about much more than just managing people’s opinions of your organisation, it is also about building and sustaining relationships. PR practice must also reflect the times we live in, there are now so many new tools at our disposal including, email campaigns, website announcements, SMS messaging etc.
It is also vital that PR doesn’t operate in isolation. It should also be used as a key component of the other elements in your Marketing plan including advertising, direct marketing, sponsorship, and website messaging.
The PR Plan
The skills of writing a good PR plan can’t be developed overnight. As a marketer in an in-house marketing department or with an agency, the skills and experiences required are developed over time. Follo
wing this six-point plan will give you an excellent understanding of the key issues you need to consider and will give you a sound basis for writing your plan or managing the agency you are outsourcing the plan to.
The Six Areas
- Business Objectives
- Communication Strategies
- Budget
- Who are the Audience?
- Writing the Plan
- Measuring the Results
Business Objectives
As a very first step, the person writing the PR plan must be aware of the business objectives. These refer to the primary goal(s) of the PR plan and must be clearly defined at the outset.
For example a business objective could be -
- Seek funding STREAMS for a new web project
- Attract 50 more visitors a month to our new exhibition
- Raise national awareness of our new project
- Make all employees aware of our new business strategy
Communication Strategies
The strategies describe in a broad sense how the PR plan will seek to achieve the objective. So taking our four examples from above these could be potential communication strategies:
Objective Strategies
Seek funding streams for a new web project Influence key decision makers
Attract 50 more visitors a month to our new exhibition Distribute exhibition information to our target audience
Raise national awareness of our new project Raise awareness about the project amongst key members of the press, TV and radio
Make all employees aware of our new business strategy Send a written communication to all employees
The Budget
It is absolutely vital that a budget for the campaign is established for those writing the plan. The costs of a PR campaign can vary enormously, ranging from lunch with a key lobbyist to a large scale mailing to all customers.
The Audience
When we are aware of our objectives, strategies and budget we need to consider which of our audiences we will need to reach with our PR plan. So first make a list of all audiences with which your organisation has contact.
Audience
- Customers
- Suppliers
- Local Government
- Welsh Assembly
- National Government
- Local Community
- Employees
- Potential Customers
- Funding Bodies
- Media
- Competitors
- Consortium Members
- Schools
- Lobbyists
- Pressure Groups
From this list you can then pick those which are most relevant for the strategies you are following. So adding the audience to our ongoing examples we get the following -
Objective Strategies Audience
Attract 50 more visitors a month to our new exhibition Distribute exhibition information to our target audience
* Schools
* Existing Customers
* Potential Customers
Seek funding streams for a new web project Influence key decision makers
* Local & National Govt
* Welsh Assembly
* Funding Bodies
* Lobbyists
Writing the Plan
So now you know your objectives, your budget and the audiences you are trying to reach. The Next Step is to sit down and work out which tools are most likely to achieve your objectives and reach your audience in a cost effective manner. It is often useful to do this in a group brainstorming session, where a large amount of ideas are likely to be generated. There an enormous list of PR tools which can be used and all should be considered. This is a list of some of them. After looking at the list compile your own.
Communication Tools
- Newsletters
- Adverts
- Press Releases
- Emails
- Trade Shows
- Launches
- Briefing Papers
- Direct Mail letters
- SMS
- Message Boards
- Direct Contact
- Lobbying
- Web Sites
- Visits
- Sponsorship
You can now pick which of the tools are most relevant for your objectives, strategies and audiences. Clearly some tools are better than other for reaching a particular audience. For example, newsletters are ideal for communicating with employees, speaking opportunities work well for reaching key influencers and trade shows are excellent for business-to-business contacts. By selecting suitable tools for the examples we are following, we get the following results.
- Objective - Attract 50 more visitors a month to our new exhibition
- Strategies - Distribute exhibition information to our target audience
- Audience - Schools
Existing Customers
Potential Customers - Communication - Emails
Web Announcements
Direct Mail
- Objective - Seek funding streams for a new web project
- Strategies - Influence key decision makers
- Audience -
Local & National Govt
Welsh Assembly
Funding Bodies
Lobbyists - Communication -
Lobbying
Briefing Papers
Reports
Direct Contact
Presentations
The ideas session will hopefully generate numerous ideas and plans for using PR tools to reach your audiences. When you have these you can start to prioritise and write the plan.
The choice of what makes it into the final plan will very much depend on your objectives and the priorities you place on particular audiences. For example if in your plan the main focus is on supporting sales then your PR plan should focus on customer based activities and not on activities for the local community such as sponsorship.
When the final plan is being written budgets and resource allocation of staff time is also important, make sure that the money spent reflects the priorities set out in the objectives. All these elements will then be drawn together into a detailed plan that will list -
- Activities
- Costs
- Deadlines
- Responsibilities
- Measures of success
Measuring Success
There is little agreement on the best way to track the results of a PR campaign. If your objectives are measured in terms of visits to a site or an exhibition or in terms of sales volumes, then these can be measured over periods of time. If however the objectives are expressed in terms of attitudes to your organisation then things aren’t so easy to measure without using focus groups of aptitude studies.
The most important thing is to deliver a campaign that reflects not only the objectives in your brief but also correctly address the priorities of those objectives.
Any comments on this guide would be gratefully received and can be emailed to [email protected]
Jon Curtis MCIM, MIDM
Marketing & Development Manager, Culturenet Cymru
