When analyzing your organization, you must be brutally honest. Honesty is a crucial component of all things PR.
"As a PR professional, your mission to share information with the world must revolve around honesty, for you will need to depend on trust and relationships with media professionals to build trust and relationships with target audiences (Cohn, 2021)."
The same thing can be said for organizations themselves. You will need to depend on management and PR professionals to be honest about the internal strengths and weaknesses of the org and the external threats and opportunities facing the org. This will help your organization take advantage of new opportunities, assess the company's health, and stay up-to-date in a fluctuating market (Woerner, 2022). Before implementing a public relations campaign or marketing plan, you must analyze the organization. One of the best practices for analyzing an organization is to conduct a SWOT analysis.
A SWOT Analysis Template. Photo by TemplateLab.com
A SWOT analysis, also called a situational analysis, is "a planning tool offering a research-based assessment of information of all factors—internal and external—that managers use to analyze the environment affecting an organization or client" (Smith, 2021, p.61). A SWOT analysis examines the internal and external factors of an organization. The internal factors include the company's strengths and weaknesses, and the external factors include opportunities and threats facing the company. You must be thorough and honest when analyzing these factors, or the SWOT analysis will be ineffective.
A situational analysis helps organizations understand the pressure points facing an organization by exposing things that may not be obvious. Situational analyses identify "potential problems before they occur" (Smith, 2021, p.62). These potential problems come from within the organization or from competing organizations. The purpose of the SWOT analysis is to help expose issues in a business plan to allow for an effective public relations campaign or marketing plan (Woerner, 2022). When the SWOT analysis is effectively implemented, the organization may execute an effective PR campaign that capitalizes on the new opportunities uncovered from the analysis.
Three things must be researched when analyzing the organization:
Internal environment
Public perception
External environment
Each of these provides different potential problems facing the organization that must be addressed before implementing a PR campaign. As stated above, you must evaluate these things because they can expose new opportunities or things an organization may need to correct. One must ask specific questions when analyzing the organization according to the three categories above.
Internally
What is the purpose/mission of your org related to this issue?
How does this issue fit into the org vision?
What service/product do you provide related to the issue?
What are the criteria for determining its quality?
What is the niche or specialty that sets you apart from competitors?
Should changes be introduced to improve the service/product?
How supportive is the internal environment for PR activities?
Public Perception/Reputation
How visible is your service/product?
How is that service/product generally perceived?
How is your org perceived?
Is the public perception about your org correct?
Within the past three year, has that reputation changed at all? How so?
Externally
How competitive is the external environment of your org?
What are their reputations?
What does the competition offer that you don't?
How has the competition changed in the last three years?
Is the industry declining or growing?
Analyzing the organization in public relations is very important. It is not only an internal examination, but you must look outward to what the public thinks about the org and what the competing orgs are doing. A SWOT analysis is one of the best practices when analyzing an organization.
References:
Cohn, W. (2021). Why Honesty and Integrity Are Essential In PR. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2021/05/10/why-honesty-and-integrity-are-essential-in-pr/?sh=1193a7836f83
Smith, R.D. (2021). Strategic planning for public relations (6th Ed.). Routledge.
Woerner, J. (2022). Situational Analysis In Business Strategy. Study. https://study.com/academy/lesson/public-relations-situational-analysis-purpose-factors-examples.html
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