Week 10

Week 10!

Although I had already read Chapter 7 of this week's readings, I found that this time around I thought more about PR strategy in relation to our next assignment, the PR plan. I think it's important to know the value of strategic PR and always remember that planning is key to a successful campaign!

I think they key points to remember from this week's readings are that included in the PR plan is:
1 Executive summary
2 The communication process
3 Background
4 Situation analysis (SWOT)
5 Main message statement
6 Stakeholders
7 Messages for key stakeholders
8 Implementation
9 Budget
10 Monitoring and evaluation

Although this is the outline in the textbook I think there are other areas such as identifying target publics that are also really important in the PR plan. I think the budgeting section really helped me to understand more that everything costs something, to the printing of posters to the staging of a major event.

I thought the checklists and Gnatt chart was really interesting and taught me a lot about how PR plans are implemented out in the big wide world.

The readings made me think more about PR theory/ practice in that although there are many different kinds of tactics, not all tactics are effective for all campaigns. I think this shows how important it is to research.

There are two main types of PR tactics, controlled and uncontrolled. Although I understand the difference, I think that even controlled tactics are uncontrolled to a certain extent. Even if a PR practitioner spends a month perfecting a brochure on a company, targeting who they will give it out to etc, they cannot possibly control what that person will do with that brochure, be it throw it straight in the bin, glance at it then drop it on the ground or read it front to back. Therefore, I think it's important in PR to create maximum impact and information from one glance.

I also found the case study about gaining public support for the ENERGEX community rescue helicopter service was a good example of a PR plan similar in style (though not content) to the Maitland Rep. plan I will complete soon.