Best Practices

Best practices are methods or techniques that can be applied reliably in public relations with assurance that such approaches consistently will yield the most effective, responsible, and ethical performance and results. Robert L. Heath (2001) noted that the theme of best practices drives the discipline since the field's professional and academic literature so often addresses the central question: How can public relations practice be improved to increase practitioners’ abilities to influence desirable outcomes benefiting the organizations they are serving? Like every other human endeavor, public relations involves probabilities; best practices serve to enhance the probabilities that professionals’ endeavors will be successful.

Best practices emerge from the experiences and judgments of leading practitioners, or they may be derived from theory building and academic research. Best practices may be defined, tested, and refined by practitioners and academics alike; in fact, it may well be that during this quest to identify best practices, practitioners and academics are most likely to meet and complement one another. Some suggest that when the reality that public relations is a practical applied discipline is disregarded, the research and theory building of the field may then risk becoming dysfunctional (Heath, 2001).

The fact that myriad options exist in public relations makes identifying reliable best practices daunting. Edward Bernays (1965) wrote in his memoirs that he had once thought the practice of public relations could be modeled after the practice of law; that public relations could be codified and, just as with law, practiced after precedents were established, applied, and followed. However, Bernays gave up the notion of public relations practice-by-precedent because he found there are simply too many variables to be accounted for in public relations practice, which is further complicated by the fact that the variables so often are constantly changing. Bernays's assessment that public relations is too complicated to be practiced by precedent has implications for best practices. While it is clear that there are best practices for given situations in public relations, determining what the best practice is in a particular situation can be challenging.

Benchmarking is a necessary condition for practices to become “best,” because without measurement and evaluation pre- and post-application, a method or technique cannot be judged superior with confidence; benchmarking also clarifies when best practices evolve and become better. In Crystallizing Public Opinion, Bernays portrayed public relations as an applied social science to be planned and precisely measured through research. However, Tom Watson (2012) pointed out the irony that there is “little discussion” of measurement and evaluation in Bernays's books and papers (p. 391). By the late 1970s, knowledge gaps in public relations practice were being identified by Mark McElreath and colleagues, along with laments by James Grunig and others that practitioners were not benchmarking adequately. By the 1990s, some gaps in the field's knowledge were being filled by numerous scholars.

Yet, because many researchers have found that “practitioners still talk more about evaluation than actually practice it” (Watson, 2012, p. 396), as organizations increasingly demand documentation of return on investment, identification of best practices in public relations will accelerate. A good predictor was the adoption of the Barcelona Declaration of Measurement Principles at the 2010 European Measurement Summit; it has been widely embraced by professional and academic associations in North America, such as the Institute for Public Relations (IPR), the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), and others.

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