Chapter 9: Community, Not-for-profit, and Interest Groups

The primary goal for public relations is to build and maintain long-term relationships with an organisation’s clients and its target publics. This could be achieved through improved network accesses and alliances with them to strengthen lobbying strategies. Thus, this topic is about community, not-for-profit and interest groups,as they were considered important and effective bodies in addressing the complex developments in the network of public relations.

Communities are formed within society and usually limited to the local area. It is an effective strategy adopted by organisations, as well as the government sector to help them in identifying their mission with the interest of the public. Also, it allows them to evaluate feedbacks from the public on particular issue. On the other hand, not-for-profits organisations focus on building awareness and credibility of their organisations, in order to gain support for their fundraising efforts. Therefore, the main communication tool used will be through the press, using media coverage to generate greater publicity to reach the public.

Moreover, other ways that could be used to increase awareness of the organisation include campaigns to influence the public on a particular issue. Most of their revenues are from charitable contributions, government contracts and donations from the public. Thus, these not-for-profits organisations usually work closely with the government sector and rely on skilled workers and volunteers for their activities.

The last group would be the interest groups. This group of people usually have different opinions and they compete to have their views heard by the government and their favoured policies enacted. An interest group is often looked upon as people with differing views on policies, which could influence the society.

A point to take note of is that even if a network was well established, it may not be effective in terms of service delivery by simply attracting more and more members. Thus, a newly established network should gain more members, but in a moderate manner to avoid confusions in services and duplications of efforts made.

Wong Yingting
c3100899

Chapter 1 & 3: Stanton's Media Relations

In Richard Stanton's Media Relations, he unpacks media relations to simply be, "the relationships with and between media relations practitioners, and clients". However, Stanton also delves into the importance of strategy and differentiates objectives and actions.

Personally, I share the same opinion that media and public relations ought to play a significant role in framing not just important global issues but also local issues that are relevant to us. Furthermore, media relations is not only about building relationships, it is also about communication and communicating well with clients.

Where campaigns, strategies, tactics, objectives and actions are concerned, all of these aforementioned elements are critical to aiding PR practitioners in effectively using media relations to communicate to the target audience.

My stance on strategy is explained in the following analogy: Strategy is like a spider web. It comprises of and is many tactics weaved together to form a beautiful piece of 'art', of which either leads to the success or failure for their client's organisation. Hence, the strategies selected to execute a campaign can either make or break the 'spider web'.

I agree completely, that any media relational relationship should be dialogical, building trust and reputation between a client and stakeholder. However, should integrity and trust be broken, do efforts come to a halt causing both client and PR practitioner to bear the consequences? It is understood that the consequence differs according to circumstance, but not every relationship is pure and easily appeased based on mutual terms.

Knowing and understanding the client's requirements and executing campaigns or movements according to those requirements is of great importance. Ultimately, even if success is at hand but the campaign did not meet the standard of the client, it would still end up as a partial failure. Thus, in media relations, a PR practitioner not only has to understand the medium used, but also the criteria and expectations of the client.

In my opinion, where objectives meet actions (tactics) in media relations, actions are of more importance. Why so? Simply because without action, there cannot be objectives. As Stanton stated, "Objectives rely on tactics to reach a goal." These goals act as driving forces and motivation towards making the overall strategy a success for the client.

At the end of the day, clients pay not for success, but for innovation, creativity, flexibility, effectiveness and most of all, potential. Proving to a client that it is possible to accomplish such a feat truly shows the mark of an effective and skilled PR practitioner.

Yeo Ying Wei Natalie
C3085607

About this Site

This site is created to serve the educational purpose in discussing PR Issues and Strategies. In this blog, the original content on this site is published should be considered as a work in progress. They range from critiques, academic analyses and our personal perspectives so please do not cite us as sources for their research.

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Rules

1. The journal will be updated weekly, every Friday 12nn , by each student.
2. Comments can be made thereafter and all comments should be posted by Friday (latest) of that same week.
3. Each entry should be at the length of 150 to 200 words.
4. In the event that there may be a delay in posting the entry, please inform us and give us the next date to check so we could comment.

Schedule

[chapters are taken from Media Relations by Richard Stanton]

• Natalie: Chapter 1 & 3 OR Persuasion: An intrinsic function of public relations. (wk 4)
  
• Yingting: Chapter 9 & 10 (wk 5)
• Shereen: Chapter 11 OR Mackey. S (2004) Crisis & Issues Management (wk 6)
• Jacq: Chapter 8 “Grand strategy, strategy & tactics in PR” OR Speaking as Part of a Group. (Short Loans) (wk 7)
• Zhenni: Chapter 12 OR Using evaluation techniques and performance claims to demonstrate PR impact (wk 8)