Many of the issues that Australian corporate PR Departments and their Manager’s face come back to a lack of clarity regarding the PR organisational model they, and their organisation, are pursuing.
In fact to me it’s the prime reason why many Australian PR Manager’s struggle to get recognition within the Executive Suite for the strategic contribution corporate public relations can bring to the business.
In simple terms a lot of corporate PR Department’s are stuck.
Whether because of history or the organisational culture PR is simply not delivering what it could, and should, be. And I suspect many corporate PR Manager’s lay awake at night knowing there is a problem, but not knowing exactly what it is, or how to even start to address it.
I came across such a situation just a few weeks ago. A bunch of bright qualified PR people manning an internal PR Department, but getting run off their feet simply getting because their whole focus was on ‘doing stuff’. Because the emphasis was on delivery they could make no real headway. And given they were all PR graduates from the various Australian universities they were finding the reality of corporate life a lot different from the theory they had learnt.
No wonder there was a lot of dissatisfaction!
From my experience one of the root causes is that the wrong corporate PR organisational model is being applied.
In simplistic terms there are three basic corporate PR organisational models:
1. The PR Delivery model – “Let’s get in front of as many people as possible”
2. The PR Positioning model –“It’s what we say to whom, that’s important”
3. The PR Strategic Model -“It’s what we decide to do – or not do – that’s important”.
I wrote a detailed article about PR organisational models in PR Influences some years back. This explains in more detail how PR has evolved and the three models above (plus there’s a nice diagram that you might find useful).
Of course in the ideal world a corporate PR Department wants to be able to fulfill all of the outputs and outcomes detailed above. But it’s also often awfully difficult to be good at everything. A team that is great at the strategic stuff is often not good at delivery – which is often why PR agencies are used to complement the work of the PR Department.
But really it’s also an issue regarding perception – how management views the role of PR within the organisation. The challenge for corporate PR Manager’s is how to solve the situation – and if they are positioned wrongly (either by perception or in reality) the challenge is how to get out of one of model and shift to another.
Without wanting to “talk my own book”, it’s something that’s virtually impossible to change solely from within. External facilitation, often involving a PR audit of how PR is practiced within the organisation, is often highly desirable.
To change the role that PR plays within an organisation requires attitudes and expectations of both the PR Manager and the executives to be reviedwed and realigned. Executives need to be convinced that a different way of doing things is both desirable and achievable – and will bring tangible results. On the other hand, often the PR Manager has to face changing the skill set within the Department in order to be able to deliver against the new model.
If I were an Australian corporate PR Manager I would not want to be stuck running a delivery model. As my experience a few weeks back showed it’s not easy or rewarding.
To me one of the PR Manager’s tasks should be to get PR as far up the decision-making tree as possible so it is recognised and accepted in the c-suite as an essential business tool. Unfortunately there’s no way of really knowing how many of our Australian corporate PR Manager’s are really practicing at the PR Strategic Model level.
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