Responsible PR: three challenges

Last week it was my great honour to present a keynote at the 30th anniversary of BledCom International Public Relations Symposium . Here are some edited excerpts from that speech:

I want to challenge all industry practitioners and academics to work towards a better understanding of both the positive and negative impact that PR can have on society.

Responsible Communication

In 2015, the United Nations (UN) launched 17 Sustainable Development Goals to end poverty, fight inequality and injustice, and tackle climate change by 2030.

Earlier this year Chartered Institute of Public Relations added our support to a call from the Global Alliance – the membership body for PR membership associations – for the UN to add a new, 18th goal, Responsible Communication .?

Without responsible communication, none of the other goals can be delivered.??

In the context of sustainability, PR practitioners must find a way to become an organisational conscience and guide better decisions.?

A vicious cycle of distrust

A lack of responsible communication has led to a lack of trust in organisations across the world.?

In a 2019 study , 益普索 found that people’s trust in other people had stayed stable or even risen since the 1980s in most European countries.?

Globally though, trust in most institutions – notably media and government – is problematically low.?

What we have is a vicious circle of distrust.?

Institutions with a lack of integrity try to cover up shortcomings with everything from obfuscation to greenwashing. Let’s be honest that PR professionals are often implicated in this behaviour.

These behaviours have become so normalised that we can see society -wide outcomes.?

If PR has helped fester distrust, we can also act to rebuild it. Our job is not to restore trust in organisations that operate unethically. We can though challenge organisations to act in a way that builds reputation.?

Environment

As a membership organisation, CIPR can help the environment through reducing our own emissions and through educating our members and learners to focus more on the planet.??

In 2021, the CIPR signed the SME Climate Commitment, which means that we are pledged to halve our greenhouse gas emissions by 2030; achieve net zero by 2050; and disclose our progress towards these goals on an annual basis.??

In 2022 we launched a new Sustainability Communications Diploma , which is now available to practitioners around the world.?We have had 40 participants so far and feel that this will grow in demand quite significantly in future years both in the UK and beyond.?

This year we have launched our Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) Communication on-demand training course , made up of five bite-sized models for those who want to learn the basics in their own time.

We also set up a new ESG panel of expert members to lead our efforts in educating our members to operate responsibly and effectively in this new domain.?Their events are open for all to join and they are planning a series of guides to support the industry.

Finally, this month we will be publishing our first full ESG report, which you will be able to find online shortly.

Social

Annual research by the CIPR has found very little change of the make up of the UK industry with around 9 in 10 practitioners being white. This is despite the majority of industry being based in major cities where racial diversity is much higher.

Two thirds of those working in the UK PR industry have an undergrad degree. So we also need to provide more pathways in for those from non-academic backgrounds, which can be also linked to social mobility.?

In 2022 we began the process of applying for the National Equality Standard. The NES is developed by the UK government and delivered by EY to set a really tough assessment framework for EDI criteria. We are being assessed later in 2023 and hope to be the first PR organisation to achieve this.?

AI in PR

The ability of AI to spread misinformation as an extinction-level threat to mankind. That is squarely a societal challenge that our industry needs to engage with in a major way.?

The CIPR is a world leader in research on the growing impact about AI in PR and is helping practitioners in three ways:

Firstly, we are moving from AI being a dedicated training area to a core part of every CIPR qualification.?

Secondly, we are training our members to utilise AI tools and focus on higher value strategic insights, rather than be replaced by those tools.

Thirdly, we are delivering events and articles that help CIPR members to understand the ethical challenges for society from AI so that they can work within organisations to address that.?

Governance

To influence higher level sustainability challenges – especially when AI tools replace some of the lower value tasks for PR – we need to be aiming at an industry with influence right up to Board level.?

This year the CIPR has launched our first training course to prepare Chartered Practitioners – who are members that have been accredited for their expertise - to become Trustees or Board members within organisations.?

But it is a two-sided problem. We work in an industry that has more women than men and that aspires to attract more minorities. To get a PR practitioner in every Boardroom we will also be campaigning for better representation on Boards more generally.??

Lobbying

We want more than just to see practitioners on Boards, but also to be viewed as an organisation that has views on governance issues.

In late 2022 we launched our Lobbying for Good Lobbying campaign, to mobilise parliamentary support for a change in Westminster’s inadequate lobbying transparency laws.

Part of our case is that companies can only satisfy the G requirements in their ESG reporting if they are transparent about their own lobbying.??

Lobbing reform is another area that aligns with our desire to close the trust gap.?

Unequal access to legislative power undermines the public’s trust in the political system. It is really important that future governments in the UK and beyond commit to far greater transparency.

PR campaigns that changed the world

This industry has not always worked towards sustainability.?

The tobacco industry has a product that will kill around half of its customers worldwide over time, and this enterprise can obviously only function if that inescapable truth is denied, concealed, or distracted from.??

The long, unethical and, from a client fee point of view, extremely lucrative efforts of the tobacco industry and its PR enablers is familiar and depressing knowledge.??

Only last year a new BBC documentary, Big Oil vs the World, set out in great detail how the PR strategies and tactics developed in defending big tobacco were transposed and adapted to protect the interests of the world’s largest oil companies since the 1970s.??

Our industry rightly gets criticised for campaigns like these and is often characterised as one of the bad guys.??

This year the CIPR wanted to change the narrative and remind people that our industry is also a force for good.

We have run a project to identify some PR Campaigns that Changed the World as judged by some prominent figures from within and outside our industry.?

PR had a significant role in the civil rights movement, from the Montgomery Bus Boycott which was led by Rosa Parks, an NAACP activist, to the march on Washington that was concluded by the famous Martin Luther King Dream speech.?

The first Earth Day engaged 20 million Americans and helped move the planet to the top of the political agenda.?

When Apple launched the iPhone it really drove adoption of smartphones and, well, we can discuss over dinner whether that was a good thing or not!

And most recently, the pandemic and vaccine rollout was a great example of the importance of public health communication.???

Three industry challenges

Firstly, we must work to close the trust gap by becoming recognised as an industry for responsible communication.

Secondly, we must make ESG work a core part of PR teams, but also push to create a public sphere in which all organisations must take part in helping our planet.??

Thirdly, it is increasingly important to see PR as a Board level activity, contributing to the development of strategy and improving the scope and quality of high-level decision-making.?

We achieve nothing if we confuse self-preservation for sustainability and just continue in the bad old habits of the past, taking the client’s money and washing our hands of the consequences of the work we do for them.?

We must embrace the alternative history of public relations industry and continue with more campaigns that change the world in positive ways.??