Public Affairs Council

The Public Affairs Council, based in Washington, DC, is the leading professional society for public affairs executives in the United States. It provides state-of-the-art information, training, and other resources to its 500-plus organizational members and their employees to promote and support their effective participation in government, community, and public relations activities at all levels. For a profile of the Council, see Table 1. The council's corporate, association, and consultant members work together to enhance the value and professionalism of the public affairs practice and to provide thoughtful leadership as corporate citizens. For a profile of the membership composition, see Table 2 and for types of most active members, see Table 3.

Organizations join the Public Affairs Council to benefit from a variety of services, including personalized information services (council staff experts provide members with advice on public affairs best practices, political action committee [PAC] fundraising, grassroots advocacy, crisis communications, state government relations, and other public affairs topics); education programs (more [Page 667]than 30 conferences are sponsored annually, plus seminars and workshops, including the largest national conferences on PAC management, grassroots organizing, and corporate philanthropy; it also holds state government affairs workshops in five states each year, along with meetings for global public affairs executives, Washington lobbyists, issues managers, and others in the public affairs field); strong advocacy for the public affairs profession (the council supports the important role that public affairs plays in business strategy; council outreach efforts to business leaders, business schools, and the news media explain how public affairs contributes to an organization's bottom line); customized benchmarking services (members can compare themselves to “best-practice” companies or see how their staffing and budgets measure up to competitors); communications (council members receive Impact, the council's award-winning newsletter, which covers public affairs news and trends as well as intelligence on emerging public policy issues; members also receive the council's annual Public Affairs Review and the organization's twicemonthly electronic news service and gain access to the valuable best-practice information and databases in the council's Web site (http://www.pac.org.); and unique connections to the public affairs community (seminars, forums, online discussion groups, and board meetings facilitate idea sharing and the building of new relationships). For a summary of the Council's areas of expertise, see Table 4.

The council defines public affairs “as the management function that interprets and works to strengthen a corporation's business environment.” It has been innovative in expanding the ways the business world responds to the rapid changes transforming politics and government at all levels in the United States and abroad. The record of the past half-century is dotted with milestones attesting to the creative approaches the Public Affairs Council has pioneered since it was created in 1954 as Effective Citizens Organization (ECO). Soon the ECO name gave way to Public Affairs Council, which seemed to the founders to better capture the mission of the fledgling organization. For example, political education for business leaders, today universally accepted as a corporate imperative, was born in 1956 when the council launched a series of “practical politics workshops” for corporate executives at leading universities around the country. This effort at educating business leaders in practical politics would later be used as a pilot by other organizations intent on creating similar programs—the National Association of Manufacturers and the United States Chamber of Commerce among them.

...