The final blog post for our PR blog, and we are given two chapters to read once again. The two main points of this week's readings are:
1) The importance of Risk Management planning for any organisation.
2) How the "Third Sector" is affected by Public Relations.
Risk Management in my opinion, may be too large a scope for a PR practitioner to handle on his own. Risk Management does not stop at just simply drawing up contingency plans or emergency measures in response to a crisis. The plans must be constantly "enforced" and "audited", and made known to all members in a company (managers, employees, etc.). Organisations that can afford Risk Management planning tend to be very large, and may have hundreds or even thousands of staff members. Therefore, the PR practitioner may choose to allocate the Risk Management tasks to a full-time department of staff within the company.
The "Third Sector" refers to non-government organisations (NGO) and community action groups (CAG). These organisations are driven by agenda, and are not concerned with making money like a business. I guess the reason why the Third Sector is useful to a PR practitioner is because Third Sector organisations often have strong ties to the public community, as well as certain aspects of society. This is related to the readings in Week 6 about the importance of community relations.
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Interesting observations. I think risk management applies to organisations large and small but you are correct, it is more than a PR function. It is often the case that the PR person can bring risk issues to the attention of the CEO and highlight the potential these could cause to damaging reputation etc.
ReplyDeleteThird sector - this is a a large employer of PR people around the world - think of all the charities (e.g. Red Cross, World Vision) and environmental organisations (e.g WWF, Oxfam, Doctors without Borders, Greenpeace) who rely heavily of cost effective PR.
Hope this helps your considerations of these issues,
Melanie James