Singapore, 29 July 2005 -Public Relations practitioners now highlight crisis communication and corporate branding as top of their list of priorities. This is in addition to the requisite media relations function.
Five years ago event organization/management and writing/editing were listed as top functions in addition to media relations. This is perhaps an indication of the evolving role of public relations profession from task orientation (writing/editing and organizing events) to greater strategic planning and integrated business roles.
The latest joint survey on The State of Public Relations by the Institute of Public Relations Singapore (IPRS) and Singapore Polytechnic’s School of Business surveyed public relations practitioners from a broad spectrum of industries, both public and private as well as government and related organisations. The first survey was done by Singapore Polytechnic in 2001.
Another significant finding showed that more respondents (32.5%) come from smaller companies (with less than 50 employees) than five years ago (only 5%) which indicates that smaller companies are aware of the need for a public relations function within their companies.
Ms K Bhavani, President of the IPRS highlighted that “The PR profession continues to face its biggest obstacle: How do we identify ourselves as playing an essential role in the eyes of our organisationsand clients? This was borne out by a crucial survey finding, which indicates that 31.3% of the respondents feel that there is a lack of acceptance of PR as a vital role.”
In this industry, public relations professionals prefer to recruit by referrals (53.5%). When recruiting, they rated experience as the most important factor (74.8%) followed by qualifications (56.6%) and training acquired (50.5%).
This is backed by the profile of the PR practitioners, who are mostly females (73.7%), in their thirties (72.7% above thirty). More than half of the respondents (66.5%) are in senior management. Slightly more than half (57.6%) have university degrees while almost a third (27.3%) have post-graduate degrees or higher. More than half (52.5%) have public relations or mass communications qualifications.
Quite a majority would hire an accredited pr professional (44.4%) but a quarter (24.2%) sat on the fence with no response when asked for their interest in accreditation while 37% indicated interest.
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