Seat at the Table

The USC Annenberg School of Communications released it’s 2007 GAP (General Accepted Practices) Study for Public Relations.    There is too much good information to go into detail here so I suggest you download the full GAP Survey here.

There are a few key areas that stood out in terms of what senior level public relations professionals

1. More than a quarter of respondents reported that they have international or global authority over their organization’s PR activities.
2. Reporting to the CEO, Chair or COO is the preferred structure. 
3. Reporting to the c-suite also means having greater responsibility, influence and budget.
4. There is still inadequate resources devoted to PR evaluation.  This is despite increasing press to show value. 
5. PR organizations that reported to the c-suite where more strategic in their evaluation.  For example, evaluation may include contribution to market share and  stakeholder opinion.  PR organizations that reported to marketing were more tactical and focused on clips.

 
There were no major surprises though I think it’s important to see the difference in how PR measures itself based on wether it reports to the c-suite or to marketing.  It seemed to highlight how PR can be a marketing tactic or a strategic center of excellence.  In the past I’ve found many that use PR both ways with corporate communications being the strategic center of PR excellence and public relations being the marketing department.

When reading the report for the purposes of creating a more strategic, c-level public relations function, think about what skills are needed in both the senior PR executive and staff.  Most public relations and corporate communications departments have most of the tactical skills down (e.g., media and blogger relations).  However, there is a separate list of critical skills (survey and other research skills, reputation modeling and risk management, message analysis and more) needed to qualify for the c-suite level of public relations and corporate communications.   

(Thank you to Professor Jerry Swerling who led the study).