In a public relations campaign, there are important processes such as planning the strategies and tactics to be used in a campaign to achieve its goal and objective. There is also the 'grand strategy', which is the "policy-level decisions an organization makes about goals, alignments, ethics and relationship with publics and other forces in its environment". While the strategies of a campaign dictate the direction it focuses its tactics on, the 'grand strategy' deals with factors present in the environment of an organisation's market and also defines the boundaries that strategies and tactics should work within.
In the case of Pregnancy Crisis Centre, it has formed partnerships with various entities in the environment, such as KK Women's and Children's Hospital, MCYS and the Ministry of Education in order to reach out to its publics. However, the PCC's main goal and concern regarding the confidentiality of their clients have set the boundaries of how prominent its public relations campaign can be without giving away too much information about itself and the members of its publics.
PCC works under the 'Cooperative Grand Strategy', such that it believes that being a constructive part of its environment is an opportunity and a duty, and that its responsibilities do not pertain merely to the financial aspect. This is true for PCC as it runs on donations and volunteers to provide guidance and counselling to its clients, and educational services to its publics. Organisations with a Cooperative Grand Strategy do not have a very positive attitude towards change due to the additional consumption of time and finances. This is especially so for PCC as being funded by donations, it does not have much budget to invest in reviewing past campaigns and making changes to them. This is apparent when compared with competitors in the same environment, such as BABES, which keeps up with technological advances and the increased contact its publics have with the Internet and mobile phones by accepting these changes in society and in turn providing services such as SMS chats and having a fully functional website to provide accessibility to its publics, as opposed to PCC, which its grand strategy that is concerned with confidentiality has limited its prominence and accessibility to its publics.
In order to better engage its publics, organisations need to review its grand strategy regularly and make necessary changes to ensure that it does not become a disadvantage to themselves as it is the grand strategy that sets the boundaries that both guides and limits the strategies of their public relations campaigns.
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While I agree with your point that PCS should take full advantage of the new media, PCS might be avoiding the new media as they are impersonal.So, we have to think of ways to assure PCS that communicating through the new media can be as personal as a conversation on the phone.
ReplyDeleteThere could be people who are more comfortable talking about issues such as unexpected/unwanted pregnancy through SMSes because it feels less like they're exposing themselves when they're not physically "talking" to someone. Then again this is quite subjective since different people are comfortable using different communication tools. Perhaps PCC could incorporate SMS services while still keeping their hotlines to maintain that "human touch".
ReplyDeleteThe social environment is changing after all, and they can't not review their grand strategy to ensure that it is still applicable in this new and more technologically advanced environment.
In PCC's case, I suppose by changing grand strategy, it might not necessarily be the adoption of new media. Just like what Dianah said, new media lacks that personal feel and reality to it.
ReplyDeleteInstead, we could probably work on a hotline that is easy to remember: Our idea of a jingle!
This way, that would be the first number people think of when it comes to pregnancy red alerts. As much as I hate to remember Pizza Hut's delivery number (62353535), it'll always be stuck in my head.
Haha! Pizza Hut definitely did well with that one.
ReplyDeleteI believe that we need to use new media as one of our tactics simply because of its popularity among the youth. Yes, it may be impersonal but the initial message will still be out there. But, it does need to be backed up with other methods, eg. the Jingle.
I agree with you Stacey about the new media element. That is that best way to reach out to our youths, our publics because of the rising trend.
ReplyDeleteBut anyhow, we had pretty good ideas of the creation of the sms service, MSN, an ambassador, and identifying factors such as having a color GOLD!
All this would greatly help the targeted publics in relating to PCS easily.
What can i say. Those were pretty good ideas which i sincerely hope PCS will adopt.