- Confirm / realign belief
Y
ou cannot however set objectives in the same way as you set goals. You must set objectives bearing in the mind the specific things you wish to achieve and how you will measure them. When the yardstick for measuring the achievement of set objectives is indicated, evaluation becomes easy. For instance the following would be poor objectives.- To increase awareness of poverty reduction initiatives of the government.
- To get our staff to buy into the company’s share as a way of encouraging other potential buyers.
These could be changed to look better, thus:
To increase awareness of poverty reduction initiatives of the government by 10%, of the local population in six months from now.
Get 20% of our staff to buy into the shares of the company from current 11% by July 30th, 2016.
Increase Ikoyi community’s knowledge of our company’s pollution reduction programme by December 5th. 2016
Define Target Publics
No good public relations plan can reach all publics successfully, with same results at the same time. This means that attempting to reach all your publics by a single plan would end up in waste exposure and dissipation of energy. This underscores the essence of defining your target publics clearly. It is important to quickly make some clarifications about your publics, stakeholders and audience here. A ‘public’ is a group of people with similar interests and with whom your organisation relates in one way or the other, for one reason or the other. ‘Stakeholders’ are a special kind of public, composed of people who have a particular interest or stake in your organisation. An ‘audience’’ is a public with whom you are communicating.
Interestingly, these three groups change positions at one point or the other in their relations with your organisation. For instance, as your organisation and its publics get closer, they could become stakeholders. Also a public becomes an audience when you have a specific message directed at them. After the message has been disseminated, they return to their position as a public. (Smith R.D. 2002) In his Nine steps planning process says that audience definition ‘... includes an analysis of each public in terms of
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their wants, needs and expectations about the issue, their relationship to the organisation, their involvement in communication and with various media, and a variety of social, economic, political, cultural and technological trends that may affect them.’
In defining your target publics, you need to determine by research:
1. Who exactly are going to be affected by your campaign or programme?
2. Who are the opinion leaders whose views are respected and taken by your target public?
Any public has some credible and authoritative sources that they believe in. These people can facilitate passing your message across and also push acceptance of the message by the target publics.
3. You also need to determine the best media to reach your target publics. Every public has one medium or some media from which they get their information which could be radio, television, magazines and so on. Knowledge of their preferred media is crucial to the success of your programme or campaign.
Can you recall our typology of publics or audiences in an early unit? For a reminder you have primary audience, secondary audience and tertiary audience. In your plan, you must identify and prioritize them in the relative order of the importance of each audience to the success of your programme, bearing in mind your budget, time constraints and other factors.
Define Messages
A clearly defined target public would ensure a clearly defined message. In order words, when you know whom you are taking to, you’ll know what to tell them. You should be explicitly clear about what message you are sending to each public. A good message addresses a public’s values and aims to get specific responses that would help your organisation to achieve particular public relations goals.
Generally, a message consists of two parts namely: content and language. The content refers to what you actually want to tell the publics while the language is the way, tone and lingua with which you convey
it. The content is like the item in the bag and the language is the container with which you package the item.
Now this is important, you can have a good content in a poor language and a poor content in a good language. When you send a good content in a poor language, the result is that
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your message is not understood. On the other hand, when you have a poor content (message) in a good language, you create a worse problem than you are attempting to solve in your campaign. You have feed the people with the wrong stuff! They have understood a poor message properly! Either way, what you achieve is miscommunication. All these tell us that the message you package to your publics must be thoroughly written and pretested. The services of good copywriters would be valuable here if you do not have some in- house.
Schedule
This stage requires you to timetable all aspects of the public relations plan complete with dates. Your plan could run for a year, six months or three months. You can hardly have anything less. You would need to schedule every aspect of the overall plan. You must however do this in concert with other persons or companies you are using outside your organisation, e.g. the research companies, media planners, the copywriters, media production outfits as well as information dissemination media like radio, television and the print. Scheduling also involves assigning managers for each of your tactics. It entails deciding the frequency of message exposure and what pattern to adopt from options like continuous, flighting, pulsing and massing.
Define Media
Much of the decisions you would be taking here would be based on your findings at the research stage. The media through which you expose your message to your target audience or public are as important as the message. One authority in mass media Marshall McLuhan is noted for his evergreen statement “the medium is the message”.
Your must avoid waste exposure by ensuring that you use those media by which you can get to your target public or audience with minimal expenditure of effort or money.
Depending on the nature of the campaign and your budget, you may decide to use a multimedia approach which brings together a string of media. You may engage the services of expert media planners here if you feel it is needful. It could just make the difference in how far your message goes.
Budget
Now I am going to tell you one fundamental truth. After all said and done in terms of planning, it is the budget that decides how well the programme will run. A good and commensurate budget could make the plan a grand success, while a lean and less appropriate budget could make it an abysmal failure. A warning here: Never downplay the place of the budget in the overall plan. Tell your boss or your client what it would
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cost to do the programme he or she wants. If the budget will not take it, then replan for a smaller budget. You would want to budget to cover personnel, materials, media costs, equipment and facilities, administrative items and other sundry expenses. It is proper to set aside some good amount for unforeseen exigencies as well.
Communication Strategy
Remember we are looking at a public relations campaign. Any campaign would need an appropriate strategy to win. This is the section in which you determine what communication initiatives to use. During your brainstorming session, you would have decided on some creative strategies to use to achieve your set campaign objectives.
Any strategy you use would only be relevant to the extent that if helps you to achieve the objectives.
Evaluation
Having set measurable goals and objectives, evaluation would be easy. Evaluation involves regulating and modifying your public relations programmes as you progress, and examining the degree to which the programme objectives are met when it is completed.
Your evaluation points would include your overall research, your messages (did the content and the language gel?), your media of dissemination (Did they help you to reach your target audience?), was your budget properly used? Was it enough?
4.0 CONCLUSION
Writing a good public relations plan can be as easy as the steps we have examined above.
You must however take into consideration your peculiar situation, environment and other helping or limiting factors. What works in one situation may not necessarily work in another, but with these steps you can always retrace your steps back when anything goes wrong. I must also say that sometimes everything may not go clockwork. You will simply use whatever lessons you have learnt in one stage for another.
5.0 SUMMARY
In this unit, we have seen the basic steps to writing a public relations plan. We saw that you must have a situation analysis, you must establish goals and objectives, define target publics, define messages, do a budget, a schedule, have a strategy and you must make provision for evaluation.