When working on a public relations campaign, formative research is a very important first step in building your campaign. Analyzing the situation that your organization is facing is important to be able to conduct efficient research and/or define the goal of your communication program as the campaign proceeds. In order to learn from your research about your organization, you should review academic and professional literature alongside case studies on relevant companies. To get a better understanding of your situation, reviewing organizations that have successfully gone through similar nature to you can be very helpful.
4 Areas to Focus on:
There are four areas that you should focus on when analyzing the situation: issues management, risk management, crisis management, and reputation management.
An Issue is a situation that presents a matter of concern to an organization and issues management is the process by which an organization tries to anticipate emerging issues and respond to them before they get out of hand, perhaps even before they break into the scene.
Risk management is the process of identifying, controlling, and minimizing the impact of uncertain events on an organization. Organizations need to not be oblivious to their flaws and actually attack them firsthand by addressing what their risks are and identifying possible solutions.
A crisis is a turning point for better or worse; a decisive moment. Crisis management is the process by which an organization deals with out-of-control issues. In the crisis management department of your organization, there should be a crisis plan created that prepares the company for a crisis to happen to their organization and will help guide them through it.
Reputation management is a continuing long-term process of how an organization seeks to influence the way its publics view and understand the organization. This area has to do with word-of-mouth and what consumers and key publics are saying about the organization. The ethics of your organization play a big role in people's perception of it, and also serve as an outline of acceptable behaviors within the organization.
As a reminder, issues management deals with potential events, risk management is for implied threats, crisis management involves reaction to actual occurrences, and reputation management is the organization's reputation.
2 Types of PR Situations:
The first type of situation an organization could be facing is an opportunity. An opportunity situation offers a potential advantage to the organization or its publics. An opportunity situation is most likely a positive for the situation.
The next type of situation is an obstacle. Obstacles limit the organization from realizing its mission. These can be more of a negative for a company because they are something that needs to be overcome.
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