The role of the practitioner as activist and community-builder
Back to Basics - Culture, Community and Creativity was the theme of PRAXIS in Pune that took place this weekend. It’s one of the biggest annual meetings of public relations practitioners in the world that takes place in India each year.
Community is an important public relations strategy. It enables an organisation to bring together a group of stakeholders around a cause aligned to a common set of values. Social and owned media are often used as platforms. The outcome is empowerment, influence and change.
The alignment between community and public relations was set out by Dean Kruckeberg and Kenneth Starck in 1998 in their book Public Relations and Community. Cluetrain Manifesto, published around the same time, went further and made the case that communities can be both activist and economic forces.
PRAXIS heard inspiring examples of communities used to address societal polarisation, misinformation and drive culture change.
In her keynote, Sarah Waddington CBE shared examples of organisations using communities to bring people together to create understanding and change at a societal level.
She spoke about Worlds Apart, a campaign created by Heineken to bring people with polar opposite views together over a beer.
She also referenced the UN Women-convened and Unilever-backed Unstereotype Alliance, which seeks to empower individuals to become 'upstanders, not bystanders, ' against stereotypical behaviour, aiming to create a more equal world.
Communities can equally be focussed on internal stakeholders. Bruno Tourne, Head of Corporate Communications, Sanofi, built an internal employee community of 2024 Olympic volunteers from 54 countries at the Paris Olympics. The community promoted values of inclusion and the relationship between science and sport.
Practitioners are also using community engagement to act as activists and a force for change within the industry itself. Sarah highlighted the examples of the Asian Communications Network, People Like Us, and Socially Mobile.
The International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO), the voice of public relations consultancies around the world is tackling climate change through a UN initiative. It is creating a series of member-led campaigns and activations to mobilise climate action.
President Grzegorz Szczepański said that the role of the ICCO community raised awareness of the role of communication as a factor in the climate crisis among practitioners and in wider society.
Brenda Darden Wilkerson, President and CEO of AnitaB.org, a community for women working in technology, called on all practitioners to use their voices within their own communities. But you need to pick your fights and think hard about the battles that you engage in, she said.
Ultimately, finding personal purpose and your own community should drive every practitioner with a recognition that it is a journey, not a destination and that it can change along the way.
