Letter to Cousin; What is PR?

Amy Morris
1000 North 400 East
Logan, Utah 84321



Mr. Colby Broadbent
1314 Sandbags Drive
St. George, UT 84770

September 1, 2008

Dear Colby,

Hey cousin! How have you been since you last wrote me? How is school going for you? Are you surviving all of your classes? I can not believe your professor had your entire class write a nine page paper because one student fell asleep during his lecture. I wonder what he would do if someone sneezed. Have you decided what you will be majoring in? To answer your question from your last letter about what exactly is Public Relations and why I am majoring in it; I actually have quite the explanation for you.
Public Relations, also know as PR, manages the flow of information between an organization and its public. PR provides business and organizations a service by keeping the public and media informed of their works in order to create a better understanding of their company. Public Relation representatives work toward positive exposure for an individual or an organization; while also skillfully downplaying any negative exposure.
PR is leadership and organization that helps companies. It facilitates organizational change, communicates with relevant internal and external publics, creates consistency between an organizations goals and its expectations and it develops, executes and evaluates an organizations program.
Public Relation representatives form relationships with community leaders, the media, customers, investors, and government agencies. When dealing with these relationships PR reps must have the nature of being persuasive. Representatives must also have a strong knowledge of opinion, policy, attitudes, and social changes in their publics and society in general.
There are certain skills best to have when working in PR: communication skills; verbal and written, multitasking, excellent at time management and organizational and planning skills. It is also best to have some understanding of media background in order to understand how the media and advertising works.
Public relations involves a lot of writing and just like any profession writing is important. A public relations representative, Tim Brown, from the Richter7 PR agency said, “If you can write well, you can think well.” There is a lot of writing in PR; it involves: news releases, brochures, video scripts, strategic plans, presentations, speeches, press kits, newsletters, business letters, media pitches, etc.
Sometimes PR and marketing get confused as being the same thing. Although both have similarities in their widespread research, indentifying target publics, developing communication plans and supporting efforts to market goods and services. PR is different from marketing because it deals with internal publics, reputation or image building, external publics other than consumers, crisis management, public opinion, social issues and issue management.
A main key of PR is the ROPE system. ROPE; research, objectives, programming, and evaluation; is a series of steps used when conducting a project.
Research is a key part of being successful in PR; it is important because it helps you target who your target public is and the best way to address them. When doing research in Public Relations it is best to organize your findings into four areas: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT). By organizing your findings into these categories a PR representative is able to see the best way they may conduct a campaign or project. They can jump on their opportunities and get going with them and at the same time take note of their strengths and see if they can withstand their threats or do they need to take more reality consideration of their weaknesses. The SWOT analysis shows PR representatives where they can easily work and make things happen and where they can also take some risks.
Once research is completed; PR specialists take the information gathered and create objectives and goals for their projects and put them into action by completing the programming step of the ROPE process. Lastly, by beginning and ending every PR project with evaluation will help the PR agency or representative see where they can improve and/or what will work for their next project.
Now Colby, I know this was a lot of information but I hope it helps you out a little in understanding what public relations is. I hope you have a fabulous day and I will see you at Thanksgiving!

Sincerely,
Amy