kristina

Planning is one of the most important things a public relations practitioner can do.  There are three types of plans: ad hoc plans (short term plans), standing plans (long-term plans), and contingency plans (crises plans).  Each help build long lasting relationships with the desired publics.  An example of an ad hoc plan found in another public relations book is an encounter that happened with Nabisco chocolate chip cookies.  It just so happened that a teacher was teaching her students to count, so they counted the chocolate chips in the Nabisco cookies.  The claim of Nabisco is that there are at least 1,000 chips in each package.  The students’ counts always fell considerably lower than that.  So, they wrote Nabisco many angry letters.  So, Nabisco sent a spokesperson over to the school and showed them there there were actually well over 1,000 chips in the cookies by soaking them until all dissolved but the chips.

This shows the public just how interested their company is in building their relationship with you.  They want to maintain their great standing with everyone and do not want to lower their integrity.  They are an honest and open company.  This could be part of Nabisco’s values and your public relations practices ALWAYS need to stay aligned with your company’s values (as noted in several chapters).  This is one of the reasons why practitioners plan.

So, this leads to how practitioners plan.  There is the consensus building, brainstorming, and the written plan.  The written plan is made up of goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics.  The written plan is the most important, eventually, because it could turn into a proposal which is sold to clients. In a PR blog, an expert defines how to make a good communication/PR plan.  And, almost in the same order as our book, he says that we need to set a goal, define our strategies, define the objective for each strategy, and develop tactics.  Objectives and strategies are reversed in our book, but each has the same definition on this blog.  And then he gives a simple example of what each of these things are.

A “real life” example of how this plan is drawn out is shown here.  They don’t provide their tactics, but they do show us the results of two case studies.  Most likely, these would be written out more formal for a proposal before pitching it to the company such as Walt Disney.  These plans supported the goals of the organization, stayed goal-oriented, it was realistic, flexible, and values driven (what a good plan looks like).

The biggest thing stressed in this chapter was the ABSOLUTE NEED to have a plan, because that is the basis for a good and lasting relationship.