10 #FuturePRoof quotes as crowdsourced project hits 800 downloads
The #FuturePRoof project brought together 30+ thinkers and doers in an uplifting study of the future of public relations. I caught up with #FuturePRoof-founder Sarah Hall last week to talk about her project ahead of its launch last Monday.
#FuturePRoof is a book and a community. It's available as a free download and in print worldwide priced £25.99.
It's an upbeat discussion about the future of public relations and is clearly timely. 800 copies have been downloaded in less than a week.
35 people from across the profession have written about public relations practice ranging from business models to diversity; and from automation to measurement.
There's a mix of agency and in-house; academic and practitioner; male and female; and young and old. Each chapter is the start of a conversation about the future of our business.
I helped Sarah along the way and contributed the foreword and a chapter on competency frameworks.
#FuturePRoof is a best practice example of public relations. It started with a clear purpose, created a community and content based on insight, and is now engaging a wider public.
I read the book in draft and again in its final stages. It's really striking how well some practitioners write and capture the issues and opportunities facing our profession so elegantly and wittily.
Here are 10 of my favourite quotes.
#1 Authenticity – Anne Gregory
"Values are a double-edged sword. They are also the bullshit yardstick. It’s the difference between declared and lived values that measures the legitimacy gap and it is here where organisations find themselves exposed to challenge, ridicule and potential lethal threat."
#2 Automation – Scott Guthrie
"Those all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets. More a challenge than a meal. Not how much you like but how much it’s possible to eat for the set price. The same warning is true with automation."
#3 Diversity - Farzana Baduel
"The lack of diversity in the industry is an issue when creating authentic and impactful campaigns to reach sectors of the community that we may have no contact with ourselves."
#4 Gender equality – Sarah Hall
"The Government Equalities Office states that closing the gender pay gap could add 10% to the size of our economy by 2030. This is most definitely a business not a gender issue."
#5 Learning – Heather Yaxley
"Sustainable professional development will involve portable ‘passports’ where learning and achievements are recorded – and accredited – as a key element of personal career identities."
#6 Measurement – John Brown
"If we spent half as much time thinking about measurement as we do about what to next float down the Thames then we’d be all enjoying a measurement and evaluation golden age."
#7 Opportunity – Jon White
"More fundamentally, public relations is necessary because of increasing complexity in the social world, in global, political and economic developments and because of technological developments."
#8 People – Jack Hubbard
"If you want your employees to put their heart and soul into the company, the company must put its heart and soul into its people."
#9 Relationships - Iliyana Stareva
"Outbound interrupts, inbound attracts. [Inbound public relations] attracts with content."
#10 Value – Alex Myers
"We need to learn how to budget like consultants rather than cleaners. […] As an agency you will fail commercially because of only two things: over-servicing, or being shit."
We've had some interesting approaches and conversations this week about developing the community a platform for policy, learning and thought leadership.
Watch this space.
