PR's Relationship With Top Management is Improving

According to the USC-Annenberg study of 520 PR departments in the U.S., PR practitioners are feeling very good these days about their relationship with top management.

This survey result is at odds with conventional wisdom, which has PR people perpetually wringing their hands about their perceived lack of status with the C-Suite. I think we've arrived, people.

The authors state: "The results reflect a consistently healthy degree of management support for PR that can be leveraged to expand budgets and staff. The authors believe that the status of PR practitioners in their organizations as serious contributors and counselors to senior management is stable and strong. This and other key indicators of professional good health (i.e., budget and staff growth) suggest to us that the PR industry is better positioned to weather an economic downturn than it has been in the past."

Other findings regarding PR's relationship with management:

• It is encouraging to see that, even among smaller organizations, PR practitioners are more and more involved in the important strategy meetings at which the key decisions and direction of their organizations are planned and analyzed.
• The profession consistently does best among the largest respondent organizations. To the extent that those organizations represent the most successful American enterprises, this can be seen as a strong endorsement of the profession that organizations of other sizes might be wise to emulate.
• The conviction of respondents that CEOs value the contributions of PR is now undeniable and signifies a much improved self-image and degree of confidence within the profession over previous surveys.
• Nonetheless, the authors believe that practitioners must guard against the unhealthy flip side of that confidence â€" overconfidence. Still to be addressed is the evaluation-related question, "from what hard data do they (and their CEOs) derive their optimistic beliefs?"