What is it? The field of Public Relations is often confused with "media relations/publicity." The two, though, are not one and the same. It's often helpful to people to learn that PR is a practice that involves all of the audiences influencing or having an impact upon an organization. Such audiences are, for example, employees, legislators, key influentials, consumers, customers, the media, donors, members, policy-makers and other groups, depending upon the particular organization. You may, as a result, determine that you need a program directed at employees, in other words, an employee relations program. That's a PR program. What's important to understand is that when you say you are seeking a PR program to a practitioner, we think multi-audience. Does that mean we will only craft a program for multiple audiences? No. But we may advise you that should you not want a particular audience to be included in a strategy that your results will be impacted. Within the field of PR, practitioners have many tools of communication at their disposal for the implementation of programming. Examples of tools include: institutional ads, brochures, flyers, press releases, graphics, video news releases, radio releases, PSA's, speeches, satellite feeds, and much, much more. When a PR program is being developed, one dips into the bag of tools and makes decisions as to which tools should be used to reach the goal. It is the synergy in their use that achieves the desired attitudinal or behavioral effect. One important point to note, though, is that publicity is only one of the tools of practitioners and it is a tool whose audience is the media. The Steps PR programs are comprised of four basic components or steps. They are: research, plan/strategy development, implementation, evaluation. All of them are equally important: the reseach stage is the foundation for the development of the strategy; the strategy is the roadmap for implementation; continuous evaluation during program execution is what enables program changes to be made and to determine if goals are being met. We understand that many smaller than Fortune 500 companies cannot afford extensive research programs. A complete lack of it, though, is, in our estimation, a costly mistake. If your agency doesn't do it, then you should -- and acknowledge that the strategy development stage will only be as good as the foundation. How We Work When you request a PR program from us, we first gather preliminary information from you. One of the ways that we do this is through initial conversation and by asking you to complete a short list of questions. Next, we prepare, pro bono, what we refer to as a Pre-proposal. This is a one-page document. Broad brush strokes are used to forumlate it. If it appears acceptable to you, then work proceeds on research and strategy development -- fee-based services. Only after both parties are clear and mutually agree upon the work to be done can we cost out the program. Implementation and concurrent evaluation are, of course, the subsequent steps.
	CFNA Inc.:PR/Marketing/Business Consulting * Online & Offline ---Cynthia Freyer's New-world Agency(CFNA Inc.) --- 115 State Street, Ste. 213 * Pullman, WA. 99163 509.332.3956 Voice * 509.334.2525 Fax nuclients@cfnaonline.com Last Updated 27-June-98 Report Technical Problems To Webmaster 1998 Copyright © CFNA, Inc.