Is it public relations or public education?
Sometimes it’s necessary to educate people about a cause or product before you can effectively use public relations to shape their opinions about your organization or company.
To illustrate this, I’ll go back to my early career as marketing director for a paging company in the early 90’s. Up until then, pagers had mostly been used by emergency personnel and service technicians. Paging technology was taking off—no longer were pagers just “beepers”—but the general public just didn’t connect with them yet. We could have spent a fortune in advertising and PR and never been successful at selling pagers. So our task as marketers was to inform and educate John and Jane Q. Public on how a pager could help them—the parent, the student, the supervisor, the assistant, and so on.
In the PR and marketing business we see this a lot: organizations and businesses sink a lot of money into ads and wonder why they are not effective. Occasionally, it’s just a matter of ensuring that potential clients or donors know WHAT you are before they know WHO you are.
