THE POSA POSER
By Terence Fane-Saunders
Chairman and Chief Executive, Chelgate Ltd

World-weary PR professionals may find the little piece which follows a tad too simple for their tastes. It was first written as a guide for people with little or no PR experience. But as time has passed, I've changed my mind. With PR strategies growing ever more subtle and complex, sometimes all of us need a reality test. The simple POSA routine can be a useful way of ensuring that our feet still occasionally touch the ground. So, without apologies:

Training in PR is still a pretty crude business compared with most professions. Twenty years ago, as a pushy young graduate who knew everything yet knew nothing, I was lucky enough to work for a boss who believed in training. His approach may have been quite primitive - but most of the industry, by comparison, was still neanderthal.

I won't embarrass him, so I'll call him Bob. Bob's favourite technique was to sit three juniors around a table and present each of us with a short written brief, sketching out a PR problem at some troubled company of his invention. There would be fifteen minutes' silence while he scraped, tapped, stuffed, lit and relit his vile smelling pipe. Then we would be required to perform, each of us presenting, without notes, an outline public relations plan to the brief he'd set.

Bob had a formula by which he judged us. Pretty quickly it became our formula too. It was very simple, just four letters: POSA.

Our profession has advanced a long way since those days. But I still find the POSA formula invaluable. When I have to develop a programme, I think POSA. When I review one, I do the same. It provides a test, a direction and an instant framework.

It's simple enough really. POSA stands for Publics, Objectives, Strategies, Action. Try it when you are next developing or reviewing a programme.

First, who are your publics? What are the relationships this programme really has to address?

Next, check the objectives. What do you want from those relationships? Do you want to initiate, change or reinforce them?

With your publics defined and your objectives clear, that's the time to start thinking about strategies (remembering that relationships are shaped at least as much by what you do as by what you say).

Finally, decide the actions. What tactics will best support the strategies you have agreed and who will be responsible for implementing them?

By now, the hard-bitten PRO is probably sighing with blasé boredom. This is all so basic; why bother to spell it out?

The answer is because we forget the value of simplicity. As PR plans grow more complex, more sophisticated, more subtle, more far reaching, they tend to lose touch with fundamentals. They disappear down intriguing blind alleys. They busy themselves with irrelevance. Sometimes it pays to take a step back from even the most carefully thought out plan, and test it against simple, basic criteria. And there are few more simple, or more basic than POSA.

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