Public Relations Plan
When creating your public relations plans it is important first to think of and write down your goals and objectives. What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to build the value of your business to the press of future (or current) customers? Release new product information? Simply promote increased sales through out your community? Or increase sales production among your employees? Think about and write down your objective so it is clear to you and to those who may be helping you plan.
Second you need to decide if you are going to need a committee. Is this going to be a quick informational press release? Or are you trying to promote business through better trained employees and general public awareness. If you're overall objective is much larger than just releasing some company or employee information or updates, then you will want to consider electing a committee. A committee will be able to help you see your public relations plan from all angles, and you will be able to delegate different assignments to different members in order to end up with a more complete and well rounded public relations plan.
Once your committee is in order and your objectives and goals are in writing you will want to decide on who your target audience will be. Are you targeting employees, or customers? Or are you simply looking for more publicity and is your target audience compiled of members of the press?
Once you have decided your goals to accomplish, and your target audience, then it is time to decide how to release your information to that audience. Do you use the avenues of a press release distribution (Press conference, email, fax, phone, etc), or is your target audience small enough that you may print fliers and use word of mouth? (If your target audience is your small community you may want to leave fliers at community centers, other business, and such.)
After deciding how you will release your information, it is important that you appoint a spokes person. This person will be someone for the press, or employees, or the public to contact if they have questions. This person will also be the one who will be the face of the campaign, or the plan. If a press conference is decided upon as a good avenue to getting your information out, then this will be the person who will speak at that press conference. This person will also be the voice of news articles or radio interviews.
Once all of this has been decided on then it is time to begin your public relations plan. You want to make the public, the media, and your employees aware of your plan. Your committee needs to be excited about the plan and spread that enthusiasm through their separate assignments.
If this is not one small public relations plan, that can be accomplished in one press release, email, or news conference, than this would be the time to start publishing your news releases, sending out your emails or flyers, and generating general interest throughout your target audience.
You will need to communicate daily with your planning committee and take note of how well each individual section is doing in with their assignments and find out what type of response they are getting. You may use this response to further your plan by choosing which avenues of information releases are having the most success and possible following through with more information through those avenues.
Once your plan has been followed through with and is complete you will need to write a description of what you had decided to do and how successful it was. This will help you in future Public Relations Plans, and it will also help your superiors to know where they are generating the most interest from and be able to use that avenue more frequently.
For more information on creating a public relations plan please see:
http://www.publicrelationsideas.com/contemplating_a_press_conference_contemplate_this_000086.html
