People who know me know how thrilled I am to assume the role of President and CEO of the Institute for Public Relations. It is a privilege and an honor to lead this 53-year-old organization and represent our profession publicly. It’s also a personal pleasure for me to succeed two friends and colleagues who served the Institute so well: Frank Ovaitt and Jack Felton.
My transition into this office – between March 5, when I was elected, and today – has been a luxury in a world where it’s common for people to leave one job at 5 pm on Friday and start a new one at 8 am on Monday. Thanks to Frank – and my new colleagues Michelle Hinson and Jenn Moyer – for their patience and assistance!
A primary benefit of this transition has been the “think time,” another rare luxury in a world where constant interruption has been institutionalized by technology. I’ve had 16 weeks to reflect on this new assignment and speak one-on-one with many Trustees, academics and practitioners. Together we have begun exploring where we can take the Institute, building on the solid foundation built by Frank and Jack, the current Trustees and their predecessors.
My vision is a work-in-progress. I want to avoid engaging in generalities about what’s needed in our profession or jumping to conclusions about where the Institute can have its greatest impact in the months and years just ahead. But some challenges and opportunities are becoming clearer, even in these early days on the job:
- NEW STANDARDS: At its roots, the Institute is dedicated solely to research and education – the science beneath the art the art of public relations™. When we think about “science” in our profession, we’re primarily talking about measurement and assessment. There are many tools and techniques available, yet there are few standard approaches to assessing our impact. Worse still, many measurement techniques available are obsolete in the wide open new world of social and digital media.
- RELEVANCE: A key element of Institute leadership is the partnership between practitioners and the academy. Yet, there’s a lot of intuition at work among practitioners in our business; there is far greater use of research-based knowledge in other professions. And sometimes research being done by the academic community is dry and removed from reality. How do we demonstrate and measure our achievements against what we think we achieve? It’s very difficult right now to measure impact in the traditional manner. Our profession is ripe for new research and thinking and I believe the Institute can help lead the way.
- FINDING THE MIDDLE GROUND: The challenge of bridging the academic and practitioner communities might best be met by thinking of our research funding sources as “venture capitalists.” When we identify research topics, VC’s could decide funding based on practical applicability to what companies and clients, constituents and stakeholders, need in their day-to-day lives, instead of something done to prove an academic point. Finding the middle ground where the discipline of academic research meets the real-world challenges facing our companies and clients is a marketplace-driven approach that would make the Institute’s research immediately applicable and more valuable.
- FRESH THINKING AND IDEAS: Part of the confusion surrounding our profession today is that we still wrestle with the definition of public relations. As one leader in PR confessed recently: “It’s a little hard to measure the impact of something if you don’t quite know what it is you’re talking about!” The need for practical application of public relations research is never going away. Our CEOs and clients are asking real hard questions right now, and we don’t have all of the answers. The Institute can distinguish itself by leading thought about our business; use research to identify what PR people need to know; use research to understand the changing environments in which we do business, and use research to show how we can support change in our companies and client organizations. We can provide depth of knowledge and insight using research on public relations along with all available communications technologies.
These are among the opportunities that I would like the Institute to pursue on my watch. I believe we are living in a world that our profession is perfectly suited to serve. But success in our interconnected world will require new research that reveals truly fresh ideas, new thinking, new techniques and standards for assessing impact, and relevancy in a rapidly changing world.
I invite you to join our conversations and to find ways to participate in the Institute for Public Relations that are meaningful and add value to your work and life.
Thanks for this opportunity to be an advocate for our great profession! I look forward to working with you, and to hearing from you as we move forward.
Bob Grupp
President and CEO
Institute for Public Relations
Good thoughts Bob. You’ve been a terrific listener during the transition process. I particularly like that you have honed down your list to a few (big though they may be) issues you see as top priority. I hope you will see the Measurement Commission as a senior partner in the process, particularly in the New Standards piece.
Bob,
Perceptive, thoughtful comments about the future direction of the Institute! As a national PRSA board member and its liaison to the joint PRSA-Institute measurement toolkit for practitioners that will be launched soon, I am impressed with all that the Institute has to offer public relations faculty and practitioners. As an academic, I welcome your emphasis on research that will be relevant and useful to practitioners. Best wishes to you in your new role.
Bob:
Pursuant to the middle ground, I think the Institute may want to go one step below that as their are many, many practitioners and organizations who are doing ZERO measurement. It’s not that they don’t want to, but are caught in a chicken and egg scenario of budget and measurement. They need one to do the other. What’s needed from my perspective, and where the IPR can be of great help and influence, are industry specific templates that will allow client to “pull themselves up by their own boostraps” by doing their own measurement, and measurement that points towards PR support of organzational business objectives rather than the customary, and useless to the c-suite, measurement of outputs. I outline my points in broader perspective on my blog. You can read them here: http://www.burrellesluce.com/freshideas/?p=282
Steve Shannon
BurrellesLuce
Excellent post, Bob. I completely agree with your statement about “living in a world that our profession is perfectly suited to serve.” I believe we do some of our best work in the most challenging circumstances.
Best of luck in the new role!
Dawn Hanson
The Fairmount Group
Excellent start Bob and all good luck to you. As you know it is vital to build a global body of knowledge and to have a much closer alignment between theory and practice, which is lacking in our field to a large extent, unlike some others, which is holding us back. Your organisation’s role is therefore critical moving forward.
Best wishes,
Roger
Bob,
while I express my very best wishes for your new assignement, reiterating my conviction that the Institute is a central landmark for our professional body of knowledge, I would like to say that the Institue’s future moslty lies on its global outreach and conversation, a process which has definitely accellerated under Frank Ovaitt’s leadership, but which needs ever more momentum and attention.
I very much believe that our profession and its conceptual framework find too many cultural and psychological obstacles in fully understanding that we are, and will be for some time, in a radical phase of discontinuity.
In specific public relations terms this implies that the so-called american based model of communicating-to, so dominant and pervasive in the twentieth century, is now defunct and its persistence (as a result of intellectual inertia and lack of innovation) in much theory and practice is contributing to the progressive deterioration of our social reputation as well as of our contribution to the public interest, while at the same time the public relations function in all forms of organizations, in all global territories is increasing its impact.
The plug needs to be explicitely pulled and this (apparent) contradiction needs urgent attention by the Institute in close collaboration with all those organizations and institutions who are struggling to develop new approaches to sustainable stakeholder relationship governance processes.
I truly hope that the Institute new leadership will want to apply for a global passport and truly attract the attention of the many scholars and practitioners from the private, the social and public sectors of all regions of the world.
You can count on me and good luck,
toni
Excellent post, Bob – it is nice to see both challenges and ideas merged together. We are at a turning point in our industry right now, trying to balance the new tools available with the need for evolving standards
Very thoughtful post, Bob, informed by your conversations with the Institute’s extraordinary group of Trustees and other friends and supporters.
It is true that when we talk about science in our profession, our brains tend to convert that to “measurement and assessment.” But public relations at its best depends on much bigger concepts of the science—including formative research to guide our work, benchmarking to better understand what we do and how we do it, and the rich scope of social science underlying this profession.
We all need to continue setting aside “think time” to get our minds around all this. I’m glad you’ve found that opportunity in recent months. It will serve well the Institute and the profession.
You’ve got my full support!
Good luck, Bob, particularly with Finding the Middle Ground.
Bill Huey
Strategic Communications
Atlanta
I enjoyed reading your post, and especially the thoughtful way you’ve set forth your assessment of the challenges and opportunities that are ahead. Here at PRSA we’ve enjoyed working with the Institute in recent months, especially on a toolkit for practitioners which we’ll be unveiling shortly; the Institute has fantastic resources, something which our broader PRSA membership is always hungry for, and we’re looking forward to more collaboration in as many areas as make sense.
Bill Murray
PRSA President and COO
Great read.