By Anne-Marie Lacey

Here in the UK, the month of September signals the start of the ‘back to school’ season. My social media feeds are peppered with students packing their bags, leaving home and heading to university for the first time, all the way through to proud parents posting pictures of their little ones dressed in uniform on their very first day of school.

This got me thinking… I’ve been where you are before. Just over a decade ago (after a short break to work in sales and marketing between my undergraduate and post-graduate qualifications), I was nervously packing my bag for my first day at university to study for my Masters Degree in Public Relations with accreditation by the CIPR.

With the benefit of hindsight and thinking about how the PR, communication and media landscape looks today, I thought I’d share with you my top five tips for preparing to go ‘back to school’ ahead of your first workshops, seminars and lectures on your course!

1. Register for a Twitter account

It’s important that you start building your professional network (it’s never too early to start) and Twitter is a great place to do this. If you haven’t already got an account, you can register for one for free.

Remember, it’s important that you’re professional in your approach, so make sure you use a sensible name, @handle, profile picture and biography. You’re not only representing yourself to potential future employers, you’re also representing Newcastle University and this programme of study as a student.

Then, start following media commentators, communication professionals and industry bodies. Here are some suggestions to get you started and from here you can then decide based on the accounts’ content who else you want to follow:

Newcastle University

Media, Culture and Heritage at Newcastle University

The national and regional CIPR account

Stephen Waddington, CIPR President 2013, and Visiting Professor of PR Practice here at Newcastle

2. Engage with Stephen Waddington’s content

As mentioned in #1, Stephen is Visiting Professor of PR Practice here at Newcastle. He also runs a successful PR and communications management consultancy called Wadds Inc, is a published author, curates a community of PR and communications professionals on Facebook and regularly creates super useful content that is easily accessible.

Take the time to explore Stephen Waddington’s website and sign up for his free emails. He publishes a newsletter every Monday morning rounding up the previous week’s media and communication news.

3. Get familiar with your trade media

Subscriptions can be expensive, but lots of different trade media like The Drum, PRMoment, CIPR’s Influence blog and Provoke Media host industry news stories about the latest happenings on their websites. Take the time to check them out, sign up for their regular emails, and keep abreast of the latest industry news.

These publications are a great way to see how people are applying the theory you’re learning in practice, who the movers and shakers are in the industry (and therefore who you may also want to follow on Twitter), as well as news about internships and job opportunities.

4. Keep up-to-date with the UK media too!

Immerse yourself in the UK media on a daily basis. A fun little challenge to do (and in fact this used to be one of my daily jobs when I was a PR Account Executive first starting out in the industry) is to read, watch and listen to the days news stories and try to figure out the source of the story.

Is it breaking news, is it an evolving news story, or has it been generated as a result of Public Relations activity? If you can hone this skill, it’ll help you to develop a good nose to sniff out a news story, understand how the media works, and ultimately what types of stories journalists are interested in which is super important when it comes to media relations.

5. Have the right mind set.

As you’re studying a post-graduate degree, you obviously have previously studied, and so joining Newcastle is very much a case of ‘back to school’ for you. However, please don’t think that your learning will be all wrapped up in a nice degree certificate scroll at the end of this academic year.

No – I did my Master Degree over a decade ago and I can tell you now, the industry today looks very different from what I was taught back then. I’ve no doubt your experience will be the same: 10 years after graduation, while the theories and frameworks you’ll learn over the next year will stand you in good stead, the industry will have progressed at such a pace you’ll have lots of new skills you need to learn, too.

With that in mind, please watch my Introduction to the CIPR Sway as part of your Welcome Week activies, and give serious consideration to joining the Instiute as a Student Member. You’ll have access to a whole host of useful resources that will not only be relevant for your studies here and now, but if you continue your membership journey with the CIPR, the life-long commitment to Continous Professional Development (CPD) will certainly help to set you up for a successful career in PR and communiction.

All that is left for me to say is welcome to Newcastle, good luck with your studies, and I look forward to meeting you all very soon!

Shall I stay in the ‘real world’ or leap into another galaxy? 

By this time of the academic year, most of you will be looking for jobs with some of our students already having cinched their first jobs in the industry – hats off to those rising stars!

While Stephen Waddington’s last MAsterclass gives you plenty of advice on how and where to find employment, this post veers off towards an entirely different career route – doing a PhD in PR. 

Let’s start with basics: why do a PhD?

Right now, you’re in the middle of enduring your research quests, ideas are dropping right and left like heavy rocks during an earthquake, data is snowballing into an avalanche, and you’ve no idea how you’ll ever get to the top of your dissertation Everest. Essentially, you’re running a mountain marathon and I’m asking you to consider doing an ultrarun or maybe a leap into another universe altogether.

A visual representation of writing an MA dissertation struggle. To the left: early stages. To the right: reaching the deadline.

A PhD, essentially, is a passport to another galaxy of research and knowledge. You all are aware that PR is a relatively new, fast-growing discipline and this means a couple of important things: there is a lot to discover and contribute to the body of knowledge as well as to the industry itself.           

“Doing a PhD now allows me to see things from a different perspective,” says Jesus Salazar, our programme alumni and a current PhD student at Newcastle University.

“It lets me be more critical towards the industry and the day-to-day practices, contributing to the field by doing something that is often disregarded in PR: theorising. I can study communication phenomena, developing, testing, and proposing new ideas and strategies.”

In short, PhD not only prepares you to become independent scholars and researchers in higher education. It develops your critical thinking, data analysis and synthesis which enable you to make rational, evidence-based decisions and find solutions – and those, my dear students, are crucial skills for anyone craving a high-level, high-impact career.

Communication technician vs communication manager

While in 2020 CIPR’s State of the Profession Survey showed that copywriting and editing remained the most commonly undertaken activity among practitioners across different levels of seniority, the remaining top nine activities placed emphasis on strategic influence:          

As you can imagine, the pandemic resulted in unprecedented changes to the industry and client needs. The top priorities shifted to issues management, strategic counsel, and stakeholder management. On an agency level, practitioners highlighted an increased demand for better evaluation and measurement, too. 

In other words, the growing trends represent the need for critical thinking, data gathering, management, and synthesis leading to solutions – the key pillars of any substantial research.

Crisis and critical thinking

Remember, most reputational crises occur due to lack of critical assessment of the situation the organisation is facing.

Think back to the crises you examined in your Strategies and Management in PR assessment – were any of them unavoidable? Of course not, and most of you rightly placed them in Coombs’s intentional crisis cluster since those organisations or individuals took risks; risks that led to negative response from their publics.

Who was responsible for taking those risks? If you remember the VW crisis, the company’s management tried to distance themselves from it by blaming their employees. But we know it’s not the employees who sign off campaigns. Those crises happened because people at the decision-making level, including C-suite executives decided that the actions they’ve taken were a good idea. They lacked the ability to reflect on the impact their actions would have. In short, they lacked critical thinking.

What areas of interest are there to explore?

The world of research is your oyster: you can investigate AI, ethics and global publics, social mobility in PR, international communication in times of global disasters, to name just a few.

The list is endless and for some inspiration you may want to revisit Stephen’s previous MAsterclass on research in PR as well as some interesting ready-to-explore topics listed on his blog.  

In essence, a PhD builds on what you’ve already studied and takes you to another level of expertise, an expertise no one else has.

Alastair Morgan, also our alumni, currently studying at Leeds Beckett University says: “My Master’s degree in Media and Public Relations at Newcastle provided me with the ideal foundations to undertake the PhD for which I am currently studying.

“My area of interest is in political communication and my research will investigate ways in which programmes of democratic engagement may be made more inclusive of young people with special educational needs.”

It means that if you’re into political communication, your research may impact policies. You may end up working for the government on international NGOs. And similarly to Alastair’s inspirations, you may get a chance to change or improve policies – in his case, to make politics more inclusive and accessible to young and disadvantaged people. How does this sound in terms of making an impact?

How to find a PhD?

There are two commonly used approaches:

Subscribe to a PhD search engine, such as www.findaphd.com or https://www.postgraduatesearch.com which usually give you information about funding options for domestic and international students. 

Look directly at university websites in places that interest you – you’ll find more options available, but there’ll be more data to sift through since you’ll be checking one institution at a time. Look at university rankings in your field of interest – the QS World University Rankings by Subject is a good place to start.

Good practice involves networking, too – again, a key skill in PR – through social media and conferences, so you get to know who the experts (read: potential supervisors in the field) are and engage with them even before you submit your proposal.

Typically, universities recruit around November/December for the next academic year, so start your research the moment you submit your dissertation. The good thing is that by now, you all know how to write a proposal!

What’s next?

There are plenty (PLENTY!) of job opportunities in academia across the globe, from London, Hamburg, Singapore, Hong Kong, Santiago, Dubai to Cape Town. 

Academia, however, won’t be the only available career route. Very often, doctorate graduates find themselves working in web publishing, advising governments or international bodies and this is when you can make a difference and influence policies.

Your research interests will have a major impact on where your doctoral degree might take you. But from Jesus’s perspective, the journey itself is an extremely rewarding process:

 “Above all, it has been a journey of self-discovery,” he says. 

“Doing a PhD has helped me find myself, find my voice, my position in this crazy world, and understand who I am.”

And this is what I wholeheartedly wish you regardless of your chosen post-MA path.

Did you know you’re taught the same models and frameworks PR practitioners use to enter (and win!) industry awards?

Over the past 14 months, the world and life as we once knew it has drastically changed due to the pandemic. In both our personal and professional lives, we can all name at least a handful of special events that were cancelled, moved to being exclusively online, or had their format altered to account for social distancing and keep delegates and other attendees safe.

The PR industry was not exempt from these changes, with many highlights of the calendar being cancelled, including the Chartered Institute of Public Relations’ PRide Awards.

Historically, June marks the start of the awards season in the PR event’s calendar, with some of the industry’s biggest and brightest talents – from freelancers and independent practitioners, to agencies, consultancies and in-house teams both large and small – coming together at a glittering black-tie evening event to celebrate the achievements of the past year.

Each year, from international celebrations to national and even on a smaller regional level, many PR practitioners and teams up and down the country look forward to coming together to mark their achievements over the past 365 days.

Last year, however, the CIPR took the difficult decision to cancel all of its PRide Awards across the country due to the pandemic. The good news is that the Pride Awards are  making a return (albeit in a different Covid-secure format) in 2021!

A statement on the CIPR website reads:

The CIPR PRide Awards are back for 2021 to recognise the outstanding work you’ve been delivering across the UK in the last 24 months. We’re shining the spotlight on the best PR teams and campaigns in nine of the UK’s regions, helping you increase your visibility, impress clients and attract new business.  Give your team the boost they need after a year like no other and enter the CIPR PRide Awards by 29 June. We’ll celebrate your achievements at our virtual free-to-attend award ceremonies later this year.

Sounds pretty impressive, right? So, what does it take to win one of these awards?

Well, I am in the very lucky position to have been on both sides of the fence. During my career of working in PR, not only have I won awards for my work on a regional and national level (and on a personal level too – I was once named the CIPR’s Young Communicator of the Year at both the PRide and Excellence Awards), I’ve also had the pleasure of judging these awards too. Not to mention, when the CIPR rolled out a brand-new category for Influencer Marketing, I was one of two working PR professionals who actually wrote the entry requirements and marking criteria, and now I can share with you what it takes to be a winner.

Essentially, it comes down to being able to clearly communicate what your campaign was all about: what research you did and how this informed your strategy, your objectives and the tactics you used, and what results you achieved.

Sound familiar? It should do! Basically, real-life working PR practitioners are using the same planning frameworks that you’re taught at Newcastle University both in their day-to-day work, but also in writing award-winning entries that will “help increase visibility, impress clients and attract new business” – a very interesting proposition in a competitive marketplace!

What do these frameworks look like? It’s SOSTAC! So, if you want to pass some of your PR planning assignments as well as potentially winning some awards once you enter the world of work, remember Situation, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Actions and Control.

Situation:

What is the environment your campaign is taking place in? Do your research to find out what’s happening both internally and externally to your organisation. Don’t forget your PESTLE and to plot a SWOT analysis.

Objectives:

Now that you know what is happening in and around your organisation at the time of planning your campaign, what is it you want to achieve through your PR and communications? Make your objectives SMART – specific, measureable, achievable, realistic and timely.

Remember, if you can’t think how you’ll measure and evaluate your objective at the beginning of your campaign, don’t write it down as an objective. Also think about how your SMART communication objectives help to support wider corporate objectives for your campaign to be really meaningful.

Strategy:

What’s the big idea for your campaign? Can you create audience personas – who are you trying to communicate with? Who are your key publics, how important are they, and how much time or effort do you need to give to engaging with them – remember Johnson and Scholes Stakeholder Mapping?

Then develop your messaging and tone of voice that will resonate with your audience. Don’t forget AIDA and DRIP (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action and Differentiate, Remind/Reassure, Inform, Persuade respectively). Think YSIC (Why Should I Care?), WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) and KFD (Know Feel Do).

What is it you want your audience to think, feel or do as a result of your campaign? Remember, the most successful PR campaigns are about awareness and behavioural change – not just editorial coverage or social media reach.

Tactics:

This is where your 3 E’s and a Pub within the PESO setting comes into play. Don’t forget to think about editorial, electronic, events, publications and mixed media, across the spectrum of paid, earned, shared and owned media.

Remember, when creating content and channel planning, always have your audience and objectives in mind. Will your communications reach the right audience, will they be able to decode and understand your message, will they engage with the content and ultimately help you to achieve your objectives?

Action:

You now know what you want to do and how you’re going to do it, but when it comes to rolling out your campaign, you need a plan of action. What needs to happen and when, who is in charge of that element of your campaign and how much will it cost. Remember, when we’re talking about cost, it’s important to think about the 3M’s – money, manpower and machines.

It’s not just about the pounds (or any other currency) when it comes to cost; consider the capacity of your team and how much time they’ll need to spend on completing their actions, as well as the cost of any equipment, machinery or other bought-in services that need to be accounted for to help bring your campaign to life. Once you have this information, plot it all onto a GANNT chart working backwards from your campaign launch date (or D-Day) to make sure your activity is mapped out by ownership, responsibility, time and cost.

Control:

Finally, think about how you will measure and evaluate the success of your PR campaign. Using your SMART objectives, have you achieved what you set out to do? If not, can you perform a gap analysis? If you haven’t achieved your objectives, how far away were you from hitting your KPIs and can you explain why this didn’t happen, or even identify learnings for the future from this analysis exercise?

Remember, there’s so much more to measurement and evaluation than just the number of pieces of media coverage achieved or likes to a social media profile. Look at The Barcelona Principles and AMEC’s integrated framework. Think on a bigger picture and give consideration to how your inputs, outputs, outtakes and outcomes will deliver organisational impact.

And finally, here’s a ‘fun’ fact for you: when judging the CIPR’s awards, any entry that uses the archaic AVEs as a measurement metric, are automatically awarded a score of zero in the measurement and evaluation section. But by now, you all know that AVEs is a worthless metric in PR.