Public Relations Plans Range From Single

Public relations plans range from single-sentence, common sense aphorisms to hundred-page, hard-bound documents, and the time practitioners devote to planning ranges from nil to nearly full-time. In a similar way, the importance they attach to planning ranges from insignificant to life-saving. There are almost as many approaches to PR planning as there are practitioners.

Planning starts with a mission statement.
The best starting point for public relations planning is to review the organization's mission statement and goals. These documents summarize what the organization is and what it's trying to accomplish, and they should provide the focus for every decision the organization -- or any sub-unit within it -- makes and every action it takes. This should be especially true of public relations efforts.
Consequently, many public relations plans start with a copy of the organization's mission and goals. The next element these plans include is a mission statement for the public relations unit which spells out what that unit does and how it assists and supports the organization in carrying out its mission.
The linked page, Planning starts with mission statements. includes an example of an organizational mission statement and that organization's public relations mission statement which shows how the latter parallels and supports the former.
Target audiences can be the next focal point for planning.
Beyond this point different planners structure their plans in various ways to reflect their views of what public relations is and what it does.
• Some put primary emphasis on policy research and issues management.
• Others put their emphasis on activities like publications, special events, speech writing, and media relations.
• And, those who see relationship-building as the essence of public relations often build their strategic plans around their organization's most important publics and target audiences.
The latter approach is what's used throughout the rest of this reading and the linked pages that help explain it.
The approach outlined here is a fifteen-step comprehensive planning process that combines both strategic and tactical public relations planning. The first ten steps develop a strategic plan and can be used without completing the last five steps. Those last five steps, however, build upon the initial strategic plan and can be used to produce much more detailed tactical plans.
Keep in mind, however, that this is only one of dozens of different but equally valid ways of doing public relations planning. Relatively speaking, it's a moderately complex approach to planning. It's detailed enough to encompass the main elements needed to execute a successful public relations program, but short enough to avoid redundancy and not get bogged down in unnecessary and confusing minutia.
It's similar in scope to the PRSA Planning Grids recommended by the PRSA Accreditation Board and by Guth and Marsh in their textbook, Public Relations: A Values-Driven Approach. With three grids, each of which includes four columns, the PRSA Planning Grid is essentially a 12-step approach. By being just a little bit more specific and not leaving so many things to be assumed, the 15-step method presented here may be a little easier and a little less confusing for first-time planners to use.
Those with more planning experience may prefer a more abbreviated process. For the sake of comparison, note that other popular planning methods range from as few as seven or eight steps to very detailed approaches which have 25 to 30 steps.
Also realize that this approach can be handled in several different ways and can use a variety of different formats for the written plan that is produced.

Take ten steps for a strategic public relations plan.

Audience and goal identification

1. Who are the organization's key target audiences?
2. Why is this audience important to the organization?
3. What view does the organization want this audience to have of it?

Reporting research findings

4. What is this audience's current view of the organization?
5. What issues and appeals are important to this audience?
6. Which media does this audience use and trust the most?

Assessment and plan development

7. How does this audience's current view of the organization differ from the desired one?
This is determined by comparing responses to items 3 and 4 above.
8. What message themes will have the greatest impact on this audience?
These should reflect the findings from question 5 above.
9. What are the best ways of reaching this audience?
These should be selected in light of the findings from question 6 above.
10. Who will serve as the organization's primary contact for working with this audience?

Take five more steps for a tactical plan.

Selecting and setting objectives

11. What short-term objectives will lead to the goals of the strategic plan?

Actions needed to reach these objectives
Answer questions 12-15 for each objective identified in 11 above.
12. What specific actions or messages will lead to achieving this objective?
13. What resources will be needed for these tasks?
Identify specific people, equipment, and funds needed for each item in question 12 above.
14. When should it be done?
Specify a timetable for accomplishing each item listed in 12 above.
15. How will success in achieving each objective be evaluated?

Public relations plans are rarely finished.
Having gone through this entire process and having answered all the questions, a first-time planner may be sorely tempted to consider the planning over and sit back to admire the plan and wait for accolades about it. Veteran planners and experienced public relations professionals know better.
Even though a planning cycle has been completed and a document prepared, no plan is ever final and the planning isn't truly finished until all the goals are reached or acknowledged to be impossible. Until then, a plan is a guide or a working paper, a suggestion of things to try to achieve specified objectives and a draft document that should be constantly changed and modified to fit the evolving conditions.
The portion of the plan which identifies critical audiences and desired relationships may remain unchanged for years, but the rest of the plan shouldn't. It should be constantly evolving. On the tactical level, objectives will be met and new ones will emerge. The latter are added to the plan, and the former removed. Objectives which remain unmet despite the best possible execution of the plans laid to achieve them require re-evaluation and another round of planning to keep them viable.
For fast-moving, high tech organizations, plans need to be checked and revised on an almost weekly basis. For others, quarterly is often enough. And, for still others, an annual review is almost too often. The speed with which the organization and its operating environment change is a better gauge of how frequently its plans should be updated than a calendar. The critical thing is that the plans change often enough and sufficiently enough to adequately reflect the changes in the conditions they're trying to describe. If you have to blow the dust off a public relations plan to use it, the odds are it won't be worth using.
"Your plan should be a living document that assists you in charting your organization's course. It can and should be changed when it is necessary to abandon or redefine a course of action. And most of all, it should not be so inflexible as to prevent you from grabbing a solid opportunity whenever one presents itself"
-- Sheryll Reid
Public Relations Journal (April 1987)

A public relations person who has a clear idea of the mission and goals of an organization and who understands how public relations fits into that mission can construct a strategic public relations plan by sequentially answering the ten following questions. This part of the overall planning process is often best recorded and reported using a grid format.
Audience and goal identification
The first questions that need to be addressed--e.g. With whom does the organization need to have relationships? and What does it want these people to think about the organization?--can be answered after a little introspection and discussion with top management. Keep in mind that these are ultimately top management's decisions, not the public relations practitioners'.The public relations people should speak out and try to influence who is included and who is excluded from this list, but they rarely make the final decision.
Probably the most effective way of dealing with these first four questions is for the public relations staff to develop a preliminary list of target audiences and relationships and then meet with key managers to review and discuss them.
1. Who are the organization's key target audiences?
Depending upon the nature of the audiences, these listings may be as short and simple as the names of key people, organizations, and communities or as long and complex as psychodemographic profiles of prospective buyers of a particular product. For most organizations the list will include a mix of short and long identifications. That's fine. Consistency isn't the goal; useful information is. Long audience identifications, if they include unique characteristics, appeals that are particularly effective with this audience, or the best ways of reaching the audience, can be very useful.

Each of the remaining questions, 2-10, is asked about each audience identified in the first step.

2. Why is this audience important to the organization?
No matter how obvious it seems, each audience should be evaluated in terms of its relevance and importance to the organization. Data about the audience's abstract or general importance--e.g., how big it is, how politically influential it is, or how rich its members are--is not enough and can, in fact, be very misleading. The critical information needed is how and why this audience affects the organization. What does it, or could it do, to help, or to hinder, the organization in reaching its goals?
Padding an audience list with people or organizations who have little or no direct bearing on the organization is a waste of time. It serves little purpose, no matter how prestigious these audiences may be. It might even interfere with or delay meaningful planning.
Be aware, however, that there is a tendency among some public relations people to become enchanted by various elite media and to make them a regular part of their media relations audience simply because of their prestige.
• Media relations specialists all over the world, for instance, dream of getting coverage in The New York Times, not because their constituents read or would be influenced by The New York Times but simply because it is The Times and reaching it is a pinnacle of journalistic success.
• Similarly, lots of promotions people for local festivals and special events spend hundreds of dollars and countless hours of time trying to get Willard Scott to mention their event on The Today Show on the morning it takes place.
A few years ago a southeastern city's special events coordinator, speaking to a public relations class, admitted that getting mentioned on The Today Show had been his number one media relations goal for two years before he finally succeeded. And, it remains one of his primary objectives today. He beams with pride each time he recalls Willard Scott mentioning his event on The Today Show even though he admits it didn't have any effect at all on attendance. "After all," he said, "how could it? -- Over 99 percent of the people who watched The Today Show that morning lived too far away to even think of attending the event."
3. What view does the organization want this audience to have of it?
Or, what kind of relationship does the organization want to have with this audience? Both of these questions boil down to essentially the same thing, a reflection of what the organization hopes to accomplish by interacting with this audience. It may be having them purchase products or services, or voting for specific political candidates, or supporting new legislation, or any number of other things, depending upon the organization and the audience.
The more clearly and concretely this view is expressed, the more helpful it will be for future planning and relationship building. Statements like "We want this audience to think of us as an asset to the community." are practically worthless for planning purposes.
Return to planning overview
Reporting research findings
Once the target audiences and desired relationships have been nailed down, the next step is to explore the existing relationship the organization has with each of those audiences and to decide whether it needs any adjustment. This calls for more than internal discussion. Simply letting the public relations staff and/or organizational managers speculate will never yield reliable information.
You need to check with people who actually know--actual members of the target audiences. Carefully conducted research, whether it's done by the public relations staff or by hired research consultants, is the only way to get vital and meaningful information about the audiences you need to reach. It's critical to successful planning that such research be done, and that its findings then be incorporated into the plan as it's being developed.
4. What is this audience's current view of our organization?
Or, what is the organization's current relationship with this audience? The exact phrasing should correspond to question 3 so the answers can be juxtaposed, showing where the relationship is now compared to where the organization wants it to be.
This is not something to be guessed at. This question, more than any other part of the strategic planning process, requires accurate, non-ambiguous answers. Virtually all the rest of the planning process, including the setting of specific objectives and the measurement of success, is based on the information gathered at this step.
5. What issues and appeals are important to this audience?
and
6. Which media does this audience use and trust the most?
Some bare-bones planners consider these to be extraneous questions, and at one level they may be. They are not absolutely essential for properly assessing the organization's current relationships or for determining what can be done to improve them, but the information they provide can be extremely helpful later, during tactical planning and while carrying out a public relations campaign.
Answering these two questions helps ensure that only the most effective and efficient media for reaching the target audiences are used and that the messages the organization sends via these channels will include the best possible themes and concepts for garnering a response from the audience.
If these questions are included in the planning process, they should be asked in the broadest possible ways. Responses about preferred media or channels of communication should not be limited to the major mass media, but should also take narrower and more selective communication techniques -- everything from interpersonal conversations to public speeches to telephone calls to direct mail to the Internet -- into account. And the list of important or appealing issues should not be restricted only to issues which are directly related to the organization and its mission.
Return to planning overview
Assessment and plan development
This third stage of the planning process integrates the first two stages with a series of questions that build upon and further explore the responses to the earlier questions.
7. How does this audience's current view of the organization differ from the desired one?
Or, how does the organization's current relationship with this audience compare with what the organization wants it to be? Arriving at this answer obviously calls for comparing what the organization's managers said about the desired relationship (question 3) with the audience's responses to question 4.
This comparison lets the organization know which of its relationships are moving along on track and which are most in need of adjustment. A frequent outcome of this planning step is a prioritized list of relationships which need immediate attention.
8. What message themes will have the greatest impact on this audience?
In some instances, especially when an organization is closely tied to an issue that has a strong emotional context for its audiences, the responses to this question end up being identical to the responses to question 5. In other cases, when the issues audiences feel strongly about (question 5) have no connection with the organization, there may be little correlation.
However, something that has become increasingly common in recent years as organizations seek more and more ways to establish additional linkages to their constituents is that the perceived strength of an audience's feeling about a particular topic will "inspire" the organization to take a similar public stance on that issue even though it has no direct bearing on the organization and would otherwise have gone unnoticed by its management.
9. What are the best ways of reaching this audience?
As with question 8, there are some instances in which responses to this item are nearly identical to the media preferences identified for the audience in question 6. At other times, the audience's stated preferences may not be suitable or affordable for the organization to use.
The means of reaching the audience which are identified here need to be appropriate, available, and affordable. In many instances, it may be most effective to list several different means of communicating with each audience, specifying which means and medium is most appropriate for various types of situations.
10. Who will serve as the organization's primary contact for working with this audience?
Even though public relations is concerned with all of an organization's relationships, the public relations practitioners themselves are not always the most appropriate "point persons" for working with every audience.
• Some prestigious, high-profile audiences -- political figures, major business executives, etc.-- may not be satisfied dealing with public relations staff members. They may expect and warrant the personal attention of the CEO or the chairman of the board.
• Other audiences may be so engrossed with technical issues that they need to dealt with by subject matter specialists and technical experts.
• Still others may not care who they deal with, just so someone from the organization pays attention to them.
Consequently, primary audience contacts can include a mix of public relations people, management executives, technical specialists, and others, all of whom are chosen for their rapport with a particular audience rather than their job titles.
Although some people try to do tactical or project planning without first having a strategic plan, it's rarely successful. It's far more common to view tactical planning as an extension of strategic planning. Thus, the steps discussed here are numbered as a continuation of the strategic planning process and frequently refer back to previous steps.
Selecting and setting objectives
Tactical public relations objectives are developed by analyzing the organization's strategic plan, particularly responses to question 7 which reveal how each audiences' current view of the organization differs from what the organization would like it to be. In addition to identifying which relationships are most in need of attention, this analysis allows the organization to identify common threads among its various relationships and its audiences' perceptions of it:
• What do people think it does well?
• What do they think it does poorly?
• What do they like about it?
• What do they dislike about it?
• What would they like to have changed?
These findings then become the basis for developing a prioritized list of objectives--specific, short-term goals--which often include or are linked to a project, publication, special event, or other task whose achievement can be readily measured. The assumption and intent is that successfully completing these objectives will, over time, ultimately lead to the realization of the organization's long-term goals.

11. What short-term objectives will lead to the goals of the strategic plan?
There are any number of potentially useful ways public relations objectives can be identified, organized, and prioritized. Two of the most common are described below.
Project-oriented objectives focus on specific work products (e.g., news releases, publications, etc.) or tasks (e.g., holding an open house, testifying before a legislative sub-committee, etc.) that end up on a giant "to do list" of projects that will enhance the organization's public relations. These can be either new initiatives or a continuation of current activities.
Usually the first consideration in trying to prioritize such a list is predicting how many people will be affected. The more people it will impact, the higher its priority is likely to be, although some consideration is also given to cost, ease of completion, and precedent. If it's relative cheap, easy to do, and is something the organization has been doing for a long time -- e.g., publishing a monthly employee newsletter -- continuing to do it may rise to the top of priority list regardless of how many people are actually affected by it.
Relationship-oriented objectives focus on the organization's various publics and the quality of its relationships with each of them. Recognizing that the ideal of having a perfect relationship with each and every public is rarely attained and that it's almost impossible to devote equal time and attention to every separate audience, this approach tries to list the organization's relationships in the order in which they should be given attention.
The priority given to any particular relationship is based on a combination of that public's importance to the organization and an assessment of how far from ideal its current relationship with the organization is. The more important the public is and the further from ideal its relationship is, the higher its priority becomes.
Generally speaking, performance or production oriented planners, especially public relations practitioners who are using a first or second phase approach to public relations, are likely to prefer the first approach and to emphasize task-oriented planning. Third-phase public relations practitioners and relationship-builders are more likely to use the second approach.
Regardless of which approach is used, the end result of this step in tactical planning is a list of objectives the organization will attempt to achieve. However, given the wide variety of tasks/relationships that may be included in this list and the differing degrees of complexity that they're likely to have, a grid format is no longer suited to reporting the plan. From this point on, it may be far more effective to use a page by page planning format in which each objective is placed on a separate page and questions 12-15 are answered in whatever length and detail is required without worrying about the fact that the plans for meeting some objectives will be longer than others.
Return to planning overview
Actions needed to reach these objectives
Steps 12-15 are applied to each identified objective to fully specify how it will be achieved.

12. What specific actions or messages will lead to achieving this objective?
This is a deceptively short and simple question that really requires multiple answers and may involve far more members of the organization than the public relations staff if the actions that appear to be needed involve more than communication activities, require large expenditures of time and/or money, or if they will require any changes in established policies and procedures.
Planning the communication aspects alone can be an enormous task requiring that media choices and formats be specified down to the level of identifying a spokesperson, selecting styles, tones, themes, and linked appeals, as well as message content. And, each of these decisions needs to take into account all available information about the audience's media preferences special interests, and issues or appeals that are of particular concern to them as shown in their responses to questions 5 and 6 in the strategic planning process.
13. What resources will be needed for these tasks?
This is another deceptively simple question that may take a lot of time and effort to fully answer. However, honest and realistic estimates of the personnel, time, equipment, and money required to achieve each objective let planners compare the expected effort and expense of completing the project with the likely outcome, a rudimentary cost-benefit analysis. It also helps with scheduling and work assignments when/if the project is actually undertaken. For both reasons it's important to estimate the necessary resources as accurately as possible.
Resource estimates need to include routine staff time and effort plus everyday office expenses such as postage and copying in addition to obvious and extraordinary expenses such as hiring freelancers, purchasing materials or outside services, or renting special equipment. When appropriate, estimates should be reported on both a per instance basis and as a total cost over the life of the plan.
A weekly employee newsletter, for instance, that appears to be a bargain when described as costing $800 for printing and 75 hours of staff time per issue may look very different when it's described as costing $41,600 and 3900 person-hours, almost the entire time of two full-time employees, per year. It may seem even more costly if the salaries of the two relatively inexperienced pubic relations staff members (say $30,000 plus fringe benefits) and other incidentals are included. This bargain newsletter may be costing well over $100,000 per year.
14. When should it be done?
In some instances, this answer is a specific day, date, or time or perhaps a recurring, periodic response, e.g., once a year, once a month, or each pay day. In other cases, the answer may outline a contingency that may, or may not ever, occur, e.g., when the company's stock price drops below 15 times earnings or if a high level executive is indicted.
15. How will success in achieving each objective be evaluated?
In selecting or setting up evaluation mechanisms, public relations people need to keep a sharp eye on what it is they really need/want to measure so they're don't inadvertently end up measuring something easy to measure but irrelevant. Not everything measurable is meaningful in all contexts.
• The number of people who attend an open house, for instance, is easy to count but, in and of itself, doesn't indicate how these people feel about the organization or if their tour of its facilities changed their opinions in any way. To find out the latter, you may have to ask them. That's much more difficult than doing a headcount, but it's also much more likely to provide meaningful information.
• Similarly, some media relations people measure their success by the number or percentage of their news releases that are used by the media or by the number of inches or minutes of coverage their stories receive. Still others have a complex formula that assigns a dollar value to their each story that's run based on audience size and amount of coverage. While these measures may gauge the amount of media coverage an organization receives, and perhaps its success in placing stories in the media, they don't necessarily measure the organization's success in building relationships with its key audiences because they don't show how much or what kind of impact this media coverage has on the people who see it. They often don't even indicate whether the people who see the coverage are the people the organization really needs to reach.
Keep in mind that the ultimate goal of public relations is helping an organization maximize the benefits of its relationships with all its various publics. It's goal is not necessarily getting news coverage or publishing employee publications or having a large turn out for an open house or ... You get the idea. Whatever evaluation methods are used must focus on how well the organization's relationships are being handled, not how quickly or how well a to do list is completed.
A public relations plan is meant to do more than look nice sitting on a desk or bookshelf. It's meant to be a working document that gets used and consulted as a day to day reference. How helpful it is and how easy it is to use are far more important than how it looks or how well it conforms to a preconceived layout.
Some planners prefer to organize their information in a grid of rows and columns where each row represents an audience and each column is a different category of information related to that audience. Other planners prefer to organize their work in terms of pages (separate sheets of paper, different displays in an electronic spreadsheet, or discrete records in a data-base file). For them, each page, or series of pages, represents a different audience and is used to organize all information related to that audience.
Some planners use a grid.
Grid planners say their approach does a better job of representing "the big picture" by physically showing the interrelationship of all audiences and audience characteristics at one time. Grid plans also look impressive hanging on a wall or being used in a presentation.
On the negative side, grid plans can be a pain to prepare, update, and reproduce. If all that's needed is a single copy, a large wall chart may not be a problem. But, for a large work team or an organization that wants to circulate copies of its plan to all managers, reproducing a grid plan can be difficult and costly unless the grid is somehow broken down and reproduced in small sections.
The other disadvantage is that the sizes of the cells are interrelated; increasing the size of any one cell automatically increases the size of every other cell in the same row or column. For example one unusually long description of one audience will make the description cell for every audience the same size, even though much of the space in those other cells will be unused. This can waste a lot of space or pressure the planner to inappropriately shorten the long entries. The latter may look better and save paper, but it may also eliminate what would otherwise have been useful information.
Others plan by the page.
Page planners counter those criticisms by saying their approach allows them to use as much room as they need for the information they have, even adding extra pages if necessary. They also claim their approach allows information to be more easily evaluated and edited on the merits of its importance rather than arbitrary space constraints or concerns that a cell looks too empty. And, the plan can be easily updated by adding, deleting, or revising pages as necessary.
On the other hand, plans organized in a page by page fashion appear much less impressive during a presentations than a large, elaborate grid. The use of separate pages for each audience may also tend to overemphasize differences among audiences rather than highlighting their similarities and the common approaches that can be used to reach them.
Combined formats may be most effective.
By the time practitioners have developed three or four complete plans they have a pretty good sense of what works best for them and may have their own ideas of what questions to ask and which formats to use. That's as it should be. However, beginning public relations planners may find it helpful to combine grid planning for their overall strategic plans with page planning for each objective they identify in their tactical plans the first few times they do planning.
Strategic plans which provide a broad overview of what an organization is trying to accomplish often work well in grid format. This is largely because the same types of information are needed about each of the organization's publics, and the amount of information that's needed about each is also very similar and usually in a short capsule form that will fit into the cells of a grid.
On the other hand, tactical planning which addresses specific projects and tasks is much more varied and inconsistent. Some projects simply require more explanation and more planning than others. Consequently, it's more difficult and confusing to employ a grid in tactical planning. With different projects needing different numbers and types of cells (rows and columns) to adequately explain them, a standardized form becomes impractical. Planning an executive's appearance on a television talk show, for instance, might be done in five or six cells outlining the necessary information and steps leading to its completion while plans for publishing an annual report might require 20 or more cells. Thus, starting a new page for each objective and not being overly concerned about consistency in their content or appearance makes much more sense than trying to force this information into a single uniform format.
Since an organization's mission statement summarizes what the organization is and wants to accomplish, the specific role of every operating unit within the organization should reflect that mission statement. Thus public relations plans often start by reiterating the organization's mission and then go on to show how public relations supports the organization's mission through its own mission statement. The following is an example.
Mission statement of
The Iowa Department of Human Services
The Iowa Department of Human Services exists to provide a continuum of integrated human services to Iowans who experience personal, economic and social problems in order to relieve their constraining conditions and develop and enhance their individual productivity and family life.
• The department is dedicated to improving the well-being of Iowa's poor, neglected, abused, ill, and incarcerated.
• The primary responsibility of the department is to help individuals or families become self-sustaining.
• The department's staff provides a continuum of services so that services are available to help clients at all levels and stages of their problems.
________________________________________
Mission of the Office of Communication
of the Iowa Department of Human Services
The Office of Communication coordinates the organization and delivery of information regarding the Department of Human Services' operations and policies and their impact on the department's employees, its clients, and the general public.
Its primary responsibilities are:
• providing public information to the department's constituents,
• maintaining media relations,
• coordinating intra-agency and employee communication, and
• providing communication support and production services to all units and managers within the department.
________________________________________

Perspective on this public relations' mission statement:
The role and mission of the DHS Office of Communication as described here is reflective of a public relations unit operating in the second or explanatory phase of public relations' development, which is a fairly accurate assessment of the unit's status in the mid-1980s when this version of its mission statement was written.
The Department of Human Services was then under the leadership of Dr. Michael V. Reagen, a very strong and dynamic commissioner who chose to personally manage the department's most important and most political relationships. And, because of his commitment to direct service delivery and matrix management, Commissioner Reagen insisted that his deputy commissioners and designated direct service program specialists be the primary managers of the department's other constituent relationships.
Consequently, even though Dr. Michael Turney, the director of communication, served as a member of the commissioner's cabinet and one of his personal advisers, the Office of Communication did not really manage many of the department's relationships other than those with the news media. Instead, the Office of Communication functioned as an in-house communication agency that offered consulting services and advice to key managers and provided communication support services for the department's myriad programs, institutions, and offices all across the state.