With PR, as with most things in life, it’s impossible to focus your energy everywhere. A strategic approach to PR means concentrating your efforts only on those areas that support your most important business goals, and building consensus for PR right from the start ensures that everyone will rally behind the specific plan you end up implementing later down the line.
As you consider leveraging PR to help you accomplish your goals, it’s critical that you gather support among key stakeholders in the organization. This means building support for PR as a strategic tool, some of the major PR activities you plan to implement, and the level or resources your organization is willing to spend on PR. By building consensus at the beginning, you eliminate the shots across the bow that will otherwise occur once you’ve developed your PR plan and have begun rolling it out. You can ensure that the specific plan you develop is in line with your organization’s resources.
If key stakeholders in your organization haven’t bought into PR you can expect them to raise questions later during the process. They may not understand why PR is a priority. Or they may not have bought into the importance of the particular program you develop, failing to understand how it will bring about the company’s business objectives. Suddenly you’ll be operating in fire drill mode, wasting precious energy responding to people’s complaints rather than proactively implementing your program to achieve the results you seek for your company.
To learn more about how building consensus with key stakeholders can benefit your organization, look for next week’s blog post, which will outline how building consensus can provide the opportunity to obtain additional ideas and understand objections that may not have occurred to you.
Excerpt from Strategic Public Relations, written by Jennifer Gehrt & Colleen Moffitt with Andrea Carlos