Quick Win Public Relations is aimed at businesses and not-for-profit organisations seeking to build and enhance their relationships with key stakeholders across a range of activities, from publicity to managing crises. It is especially helpful for small and medium-sized enterprises and owner-managed businesses. Further and higher education students, and students on professional courses, will find it an invaluable study aid, while educators will find it a useful quick reference guide.

The book is divided into five sections, designed to take you from basic understanding of essential concepts, through practical ability in handling PR tactics, to creative and strategic practices that can make organisations and practitioners stand apart as excellent communicators:

• PR Essentials helps you to understand what public relations is really about, offering easy-to-grasp introductions to relationship and reputation management, engaging with publics, and different uses of PR. It also shows how PR complements the marketing and human resources functions within your organisation, and the role it plays in enabling you to communicate more effectively with external publics;

• Engaging with Professionals contains useful tips and techniques for building good relationships with journalists, photographers and graphic designers. With easy-to-follow advice on organising media events, you will be able to enhance the quality of your media work and gain better coverage;

• Practical PR Skills focuses on the essential writing skills that form every practitioner’s basic armoury — press releases, holding statements, feature articles, photograph captions and speeches;

• Engaging Online has become vital to the success of any organisation’s communications, and this section provides a practical guide to different types of social media, including the use of podcasts and blogs;

• PR Excellence takes you on a whistlestop tour of advanced strategies. Beginning with internal communication audits, the section delves into reputation management, implementing corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes, lobbying, activism, and issues and crisis management.

Each section contains useful ‘Hints’ boxes and mini case studies ‘In Practice’, which use examples of excellent PR practice to illustrate key points. The sections can be read in sequence, growing progressively more complex and strategic, or may be dipped in and out of as needs arise. As an alternative, you can focus on specific topics using the grid in the Contents pages. Each question is cross-referenced with others to build a more complete understanding of the topic.

Kevin Hora