Here at Hamilton Strategies, one of the areas in which we specialize is in providing Public Relations services for our clients. The term Public Relations encompasses a wide variety of services, which can be applied in whole or in part by your organization to assist you in furthering your mission, getting your message out and reaching an even wider audience.
What is Public Relations?
Public relations helps our society to reach decisions and function more effectively by contributing to mutual understanding among individuals, groups and institutions. It serves to bring private and public policies into harmony, and of course, our objective is to bring a more acute understanding of traditional family values and biblical values to our culture.
Public relations serves a wide variety of institutions in society such as businesses, ministries, government agencies, voluntary associations, foundations, hospitals, schools, colleges, and religious institutions to name a few. To achieve their goals, organizations must develop effective relationships with many different audiences (or publics) such as the media, constituents, donors, members, customers, local communities, board members, other institutions, and with society at large.
The managements of institutions need to understand the attitudes and values of their publics in order to achieve institutional goals. The goals themselves may be shaped by external environment unless a proactive strategy is in place.
As a management function, public relations encompasses the following:
Anticipating, analyzing and interpreting public opinion, attitudes, and issues that might impact, for good or ill, the operations and plans of the organization.
Counseling management at all levels in the organization with regard to policy decisions, courses of action, and communications, taking into account their public ramifications and the organization's social or citizenship responsibilities.
Researching, conducting, and evaluating, on a continuing basis, programs of action and communication to achieve the informed public understanding necessary to success of an organization's aims. These may include marketing, financial, fund raising, employee, community or government relations, and other programs working together.
Planning and implementing the organization's strategies to influence or change public policy.
Setting objectives, planning, budgeting, recruiting and training staff, developing facilities -- in short, managing the resources needed to perform all of the above.
In helping to define and implement policy, the public relations practitioner uses a variety of professional communications skills and plays an integrative role both within the organization and between the organization and the external environment.
How Public Relations Benefits Society
Public relations is:
- a means for the public to have its desires and interests felt by institutions in our society. It speaks for the public (conservatives and supporters of traditional family values) to otherwise unresponsive organizations,(i.e., government entities) as well as speaking for those organizations to the public.
- mutual adjustment between institutions and groups, establishing smoother relationships that benefit the public.
a safety valve for freedom. By providing means of working out accommodations, it makes arbitrary action or coercion less likely. - an essential element in the communications system that enables individuals to be informed on many aspects of subjects that affect their lives.
