Publics and stakeholders: The bread and butter of PR

One of the most important aspects of Public Relations is exactly that; building a relationship with your publics. But before you can communicate your carefully scripted message to those you need to reach, step one is to find out who those people are. And which publics should be on the top of your list of importance?

Often the words “publics” and “stakeholders” are used interchangeably, as if they mean the same. Others have tried to differentiate between them. R. Edward Freeman claims in his book “Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach” (1984) that stakeholders are people or groups of people who either affects your organisation, or are affected by it. These could include (depending on your organisation) customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, members, local community and pressure groups.

Here Freeman explains the importance of stakeholders

Grunig and Hunt and Grunig and Repper are more interested in publics. They are also more concerned with issues and situation, rather than the organisation per se. Grunig’s Situational Theory is a good theory because it takes into account that the publics aren’t necessarily static. They are often dynamic groups that may change continually. One public can at one time be closely linked to your organisation as a stakeholder that is affected by your organisation, only to move to the periphery of your publics a few months later as the situation that made them affected has changed or disappeared.

Grunig divides publics into four groups:

·         Non public

·         Latent public

·         Aware public

·         Active public

Non public is the people not in a relationship with your organisation. They don’t affect you and you don’t affect them. As such it is not important to communicate with them, but one should still keep a little eye on them, in case they become involved at some point,

Latent public is people who are affected, but don’t know it yet. They are possibly on their way to become more involved, and you should think about what sort of message you send out to them.

Aware public is an informed public that is affected and realise that they are. They are the people who will ask for more information about the issue, and they may want to influence the outcome.

Active public is your loudest public. They have taken an active interest in your organisation/issue and are trying to do something about it.

Grunig’s theory means that to know how to communicate with your publics, you need to continuously keep an eye one them and analyse at which stage they are.