Process Research

Process research is the easiest of all forms of research a public relations practitioner encounters. Process research keeps track of what tasks have been performed and which tasks still need to be performed in the public relations activity. One can think of process research as a checklist of things to do or a shopping list. If you go to the grocery store without your shopping list, the odds are great you will forget something. The same is true for public relations activities. If a practitioner fails to identify all the tasks to be completed, the odds are great of missing a task. Depending on the task, such an oversight could cause the entire public relations activity to fail.

Process research also involves creating and monitoring schedules. Scheduling includes identifying and organizing the various tasks practitioners will need to accomplish to complete the activity and when each task should be completed to remain on schedule. A schedule tells a public relations practitioner what needs to be done and when it must be finished. The first part of scheduling is identifying what needs to be done—the tasks. It is critical to think of all the tasks that need to be done. Forgetting a task can throw off the schedule. It is good to brainstorm as a team, since more minds are better than one. The second part of scheduling is arranging the tasks in the proper sequence. The practitioner must understand which tasks are dependent on others and which tasks need to be completed in a specific order. For example, a practitioner cannot lay out a newsletter until the stories are written and cannot send a new release to the media until the proper people have approved it. The third and final part of scheduling is determining how much time each task will take. The entries on PERT and Gantt Charts provide additional information about scheduling. In the end, the schedule provides a guide of what tasks the public relations department must perform, the order of those tasks, and how long each task should take to complete.

The schedule also serves as a checklist. As each task is completed, it is marked off the schedule. It is common to note completed tasks on both PERT and Gantt Charts. The key is not to forget a task. It is terrible to have a public relations activity fail because someone forgot to complete something. Even seemingly small tasks can cause failure. The inability to [Page 645]deliver material to a printer on time can delay the publishing of an important piece of the public relations effort or mean that it will arrive too late to be usable.

The danger with process research is that some practitioners confuse it with evaluative research. Saying you will send news releases to 15 media outlets and then sending them does not equate to success in a public relations effort. In doing this, you have not achieved an outcome objective; you have just completed a task and achieved a process objective. Claims of success can be greatly exaggerated when process research replaces evaluative research. If you wanted to determine if you had succeeded, you would study where the 15 news releases were used and what impact they had on target audiences. Process evaluation is a useful tool as long as it is not confused with or used to substitute for evaluative research.

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