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Wednesday, June 21, 2006
It’s easy to dismiss PR if you don’t know what PR does
Kansas City Councilwoman Becky Nace isn’t happy that the city is spending $2 million on fees to four public relations agencies. She wonders if that money couldn’t have been better spent elsewhere, and she’s making noise about it. Nace’s dismay that a city would actually spend money on PR echoes the concerns of other civic leaders who have expressed similar outrage over their own cities hiring PR help.
Fortunately, in covering Nace’s criticism, The Kansas City Star has take the trouble to figure out just exactly what these agencies have been hired to do. An examination of their work reveals that some city initiatives just wouldn’t succeed without professional communication efforts supporting them. For example, one of the tasks was arranging public meetings to educate the public on a massive sewer and stormwater replacement project that could be the largest public works effort in Kansas City’s history. The head of the water services agency insisted it was important to get the word out, but there’s more to it than that. One of the agencies’ tasks is to assemble panels with diverse memberships to meet frequently to decide which wastewater technologies are best suited to their neighborhoods.
In other words, the agencies are charging $100 to $150 per hour to create community understand, dialogue, participation, involvement, and support for a project that otherwise could devolve into a public brouhaha (just ask the people behind Boston’s Big Dig). That’s the kind of work that PR people do that goes largely unrecognized while unethical behaviors employed by the minority of practitioners get all the attention. If Kansas City had the resources internally, they wouldn’t have to hire agencies. But work like this tends to be project-based. Ms. Nace doesn’t understand, though, noting that when she dies, she wants to be reincarnated as a consultant so she can earn $150 an hour.
A related Kansas City project is trying to motivate residents to construct “rain gardens” to help manage the city’s rainwater runoff. It’s a PR effort that has led 71 residents to construct and register such gardens so far, and more to build them without registering them.
I’m impressed that the Star researched the PR efforts and reported on their goals rather than simply report Councilwoman Nace’s objections, which is the approach most media take to such statements by public officials. We in the PR profession need to do a better job of spotlighting the positive work we do that is so much more than the what the public perceives: spinmeisters trying to get the public to drink our clients’ Kool-Aid.
Addendum: To clarify, any client has the right to question a bill. Any client has the right to question the work an agency (or any other supplier or vendor) performs. My issue with Councilwoman Nace—and the other local politicians whose dismissal of PR I have reported here—is that they start with the assumption that PR can’t possibly have any value; the tone is, “We’re spending money on PR? Isn’t there something worthwhile we could be spending our money on instead?”
The problem is not with Councilwoman Nace, who responded based on a popular but inaccurate view of what PR is and what it does. The problem is with a public relations industry that has been unable to educate people like her about the value PR can bring to an organization, institution, even a city. (Even the local newspaper—usually one of the first to slam PR—found there was worth in the agencies’ efforts.) That’s why I concluded, “We in the PR profession need to do a better job of spotlighting the positive work we do that is so much more than the what the public perceives: spinmeisters trying to get the public to drink our clients’ Kool-Aid.”
While I thought this was clear, I hope this little addendum resolves any misunderstandings of my intent in this post.