When attempting to publicize your organization or initiative, you should first map out your strategic public relations plan and then determine the tactics you will use to accomplish it. Your strategic plan is a framework that addresses the messaging strategy you will use to achieve your public relations goals in the broader context of your positioning within your industry. Your tactical plan consists of the details of the methods you will use to distribute your message.
Determine Your Message
What are you trying to communicate? How are you trying to be seen? These are two of the most important questions you can ask yourself when planning a public relations campaign to increase awareness of your organization or its initiatives. Consider what you want your target publics (audiences) to learn and what opinions and behaviors of theirs you would like to change. Think about what your competitors are saying and how what you want to say is unique and significant.
Determine Your Target Publics
Determine whose opinion you want to influence and why it makes the most sense to target those groups. For a nonprofit group trying to raise awareness about a fund-raising campaign, target publics might include current or past donors, elected officials who have discretionary funding they can allocate to organizations and local business owners.
Determine Your Timeframe
Your campaign goals (and to a lesser extent, your budget) will largely determine how long you have to execute your campaign. For example, if you are trying to build excitement for a new product launch occurring in 6 months, then you have roughly 6 months to complement the advertising campaign with low- or no-cost PR tactics that will heighten awareness and create excitement.
Determine Your Assessment Measures
How will you measure how successful your public relations efforts were? A "good turn-out" at a promotional event is unlikely to be considered a sufficient outcome by your employers to justify further spending, or your continued employment. Instead identify tangible, quantifiable rubrics that will justify your use of financial and human capital. For example, one measure of a successful event might be the number of attendees who sign up to your firm's mailing list.
Map Out Your Tactical Plan
Now is the time to consider how you will achieve the goals of your campaign. At this stage, you will determine in detail specific media vehicles, promotions, events and other public relations tools to effectively convey your message to your target publics within a fixed period at or under budget. You will map out individual staff responsibilities, resources needed, costs and tactical assessment measures. Make sure that your assessment measures provide you with plenty of evidence about which elements of your plan worked and which did not. You want to be able to replace ineffective public relations tactics with more effective ones during your next public relations campaign.
Tags: public relations, Determine Your, budget will, measure successful, public relations, public relations campaign, relations campaign