Public Affairs

Public affairs is the management function responsible for interpreting an organization's external environment, or in the case of a corporation, its noncommercial environment, and managing an effective and appropriate response to that environment. The public affairs function in an organization or corporation typically includes the government relations area, and it frequently has responsibility for other activities in the political, public policy, and public perception arenas, such as issue management, internal and external communications, community relations, and philanthropy.

Historically, there has been considerable confusion over the definition of public affairs and how it differs or is distinguished from public relations. In the United States of the 21st century, one can find public affairs being used synonymously with public relations or as another name for government relations. And for a large number of organizations and corporations, public affairs is used as the name of the integrated department that includes all of the external, noncommercial activities.

Whereas the term public relations has been in common usage since the early 1900s, public affairs is of more recent vintage. Unfortunately, the exact origin and first use of public affairs are uncertain. However, an early use of the term was by Thomas Reid, who became the manager, public affairs of Ford Motor Company in the 1959–1960 time period. Use of public affairs has grown slowly in the corporate world. In 1970, only a small minority of the executives who participated in the Public Affairs Council had public affairs as part of their department's or their own title. By 2002, the Foundation for Public Affairs survey, The State of Corporate Public Affairs, indicated that although public affairs was the most common title used, it still was used by less than a third of the survey respondents. Clearly, there is no universal acceptance and use of the term.