Situation Analysis

Importance to Public Relations Practitioners

Situation analysis is the foundation of public relations planning—whether for a comprehensive campaign or just one element such as a writing project. Because the effectiveness of the plan depends on the quality of information gathered in the research process, a thorough situation analysis is critical to setting and meeting the objectives of the project.

A situation analysis is a key to successful decision making. Before a situation or problem can be addressed, the communication team in conjunctions with the rest of the organization's leadership must come to a shared understanding of the issue at hand. The situation analysis should clarify the current situation and provide evidence to support any hypotheses.

Conducting a Situation Analysis

Situation analyses can be structured in a variety of ways, posing a myriad of questions about the current problem, the background of the organization, the organization's environment, and the significance of the situation. The situation analysis may reveal gaps in existing information, pointing the way to the development of primary research.

A method of identifying a company's strengths and weaknesses in relation to the environmental opportunities and threats was developed at the Harvard Business School in the 1950s and 1960s. This framework was refined into what is now known by the acronym SWOT. Looking both inside and outside the organization, its strengths (S) and weaknesses (W) are analyzed, and its opportunities (O) and threats (T) are identified. Robert A. Sevier (1998) described strengths and weakness as internal or institutional, whereas opportunities and threats are typically external or environmental. Sevier cautioned that different audiences may place the same characteristic in opposite categories—one considering a characteristic to be a strength, whereas another audience may consider the same characteristic to be a weakness.

Another approach to conducting a situation analysis is to develop categories of internal and external factors. The internal factors that may be analyzed include the

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