This is a summary of a post more fully explored at Public relations and managing reputation.
Public relations professionals (including political lobbyists) can be both a positive social force and a facilitator for helping positive social forces take place. Climate change is a perfect example of how public relations can make, and help make, a positive difference to the world.
The core strategic remit of public relations professionals is to identify issues impacting on organisation-stakeholder relationships and undertake three activities:
- Enhance the communication between an organisation and its stakeholders to create the best possible and most business-helpful relationships between them
- Encourage organisations to adapt their processes/behaviour so that they are more in line with stakeholder expectations and wants (leading to a socially-helpful relationships)
- Encourage stakeholders to adapt their behaviour so that they are more in line with organisational preferences.
The easy way out is to brand all public relations practitioners who work for these industries such as power generation, resources and FMCG (with the latter’s love of resource-heavy packaging) as pariahs, but we are all conflicted by contemporary society.
In Australia, especially, we are dependant on coal-fired power stations (a huge emitter of carbon) to live our daily lives. And heaven forbid the politician who tries to wean us off this dependency. The result will be increased prices for electricity, at least some unemployment and plenty of local community turmoil.
Politicians, driven by votes, lack the fibre to make these calls. Voters, driven by financial issues, lack the fibre to support the hard decisions being made. And so life goes on…
It just goes to show what a heavy responsibility business has. It is they who run western democracies, not governments. What public relations professionals can do is peel the scales from organisations’ eyes:
- Identify stakeholder sentiments in wanting to reduce the impact of global warming
- Provide positives for them in changing the way business operates (enhanced stakeholder loyalty)
- Take a strong role in driving corporate social responsibility and leverage the positive stakeholder relationship benefits that result from taking such as approach.
I have said before, public relations professionals are the conscience of an organisation. We advocate stakeholders as much as we advocate organisations. By ‘working’ for both we are more likely to help encourage a win-win outcome for all parties.
Lobbyists, with their ear of both business people and politicians, arguably have a more important role to play than your garden variety PR practitioner. This strain of PR pro needs to point out, to organisations, the benefits to the environment and to society of an organisation behaving in a certain way. This then helps the organisation ’sell’ its lobbying position to politicians, making it a win-win-win situation.
Getting strategic
Go and seek the internal organisation influencers. Present them with data you have found (including through market research) on how an enhanced sustainability profile can benefit the organisation - its business outcomes, its relationship outcomes, its reputation.
“Companies that have built a strong reputation spark positive word-of-mouth,” said the Reputation Institute in their 2009 Global Reputation Pulse. And we all know positive or negative word of mouth impacts on sales and is the most potent form of marketing available.”
Influence these key stakeholders. Create your own internal advocacy campaign. Create alliances internally with those that will help get your efforts over the line. Get external third party support/credibility from those who the big decisions makers (CEO, COO) think highly of.
Yes, we can!
In short, apply best practice communication strategy to your own efforts to make a positive difference to this world. Act local, think global. Can we make a difference? Most definitely, yes we can.
[Tell me other ways in which PR pros (especially lobbyists!) and marketers can make a positive difference to the environment and society. Do you have stories of communication professionals that have been brave in advocating the environment and society to corporate behemoths?]
