Tenth Week.

After reading the given chapters and articles, I think the key points of week 10’s lectures are that research and evaluation are huge parts of PR as it determines what goes into the PR project/programmes, finding out the actual elements of the programme/campaign and finding out the results of the outputs on the target audience/public. These steps help ensure that the following campaign would be better than the last, learning from past mistakes made.

It is important to identify the skills and resources available and the desired outcomes before you choose the methodology and later on the research techniques. There are roughly about 25 different informal and formal research techniques that are stated in the text which indirectly showed that there is no hard and fast rule in doing research.

This chapter showed a great link between business marketing and public relations, the common factor being, the need to research and evaluate before deciding on a campaign/programme/project.

The readings made me think and realize that research is the base of every campaign, programme and projects. Before reading the chapter, it did not occur to me that research was that important in a public practitioner’s world. Public relations to me, was basically about interaction with the public, true enough, research is just that: public relations practitioners had to interact with the public using different mediums to get the information that they need.