Regina Dredge,

I hope this letter finds you and your family well and that you had an enjoyable holiday season. I am appreciative of your interest in my focus of study: public relations. In response to your query, I have organized this information.

Public relations is the management of communication between an organization and the public. Any single organization communicates with many different groups on a regular basis. For example, an organization such as a grocery store would need to communicate with its customers, employees, product suppliers, and many more groups. The many different groups that an organization communicates with are referred to as its publics.

Communication, however, involves more than an organization sending out messages for its publics to receive, it also involves lines of communication from the public to the organization. This way an organization can send out messages to its publics and receive feedback from its messages. This forges effective conversations between groups such as consumers and a manufacturer or employees and management. The job of a public relations professional is to manage these lines of communication so that an effective relationship is possible between the groups.

Some of the many ways in which a public relations professional manages these lines of communication are through websites, newsletters, and brochures. These are channels of communication designed to reach a certain audience or target public. The messages sent out to a certain public would be tailored to communicate effectively to that demographic. An effective message targeted towards teenagers would be formed and delivered differently than a message to senior citizens.

Another responsibility of a public relations professional is the advising of an organization of the impacts its actions may have on the relationships it has with its publics. The professional needs to be aware of the attitudes of the many publics and how they may react to actions and policies that a company might enact. He may do this through research on the target audience, such as surveys or visiting with groups of the target audience in a focus group. He would then relay the information found back to the organization and further tailor the communication to reach the public effectively.

One very good resource that I have found is the Princeton Review, which details the different careers one may be researching and provides different links to the organizations associated with that career. The particular website is as follows:

http://www.princetonreview.com/Careers.aspx?cid=171

I hope that this information was helpful to you in your research, and if you have any further questions do not hesitate to contact me again.


Jesse Dredge