How To Select a Consultancy
(reproduced with permission from The Public Relations Institute of New Zealand)
Public relations consultancies vary enormously in size and capability. They range from one-person operations offering specialist skills to consultancies with a full range of services and expertise. Finding the right fit with your organisation is a matter for careful evaluation. Give yourself time to select the right consultancy.
Don’t wait for a crisis to occur before appointing a consultancy that would then have no time to get to know your organisation. The consultancy would be doing a fire brigade job. The result may well fall short of your expectations.
You should decide what you want from your consultancy:
- What sort of services do you want?
- What experience is necessary?
- What kind of skills do you want from your consultancy (lobbying, media relations, employee communications, etc)?
- Would you be more comfortable working with a larger or smaller agency?
- With whom in your organisation will they be working?
- Do you want local, national or international service?
Initial selection
Draw up a list of three to five consultancies that appear to have the size, location and expertise you need. Phone or write asking for an expression of interest.
The consultancies can be asked for a “credentials only” presentation. This will detail their relevant experience, the type of work they handle or in which they specialise, and how they administer their client programmes.
You can ask the consultancies to respond initially to the following questions:
- What is the professional background of the senior consultants?
- Does the consultancy have experience in similar or relevant public relations activity?
- Is there any likely conflict of interest with present clients?
- Who are its present clients? How long have they been clients?
- How does the consultancy charge e.g. retainer (set fee per month), hourly rates, a combination of both? How are expenses charged - at cost or with a set mark-up?
- What are hourly fee rates for each of those working on the client programmes (including support staff)?
- Who might be working on the programme? What qualifications and experience do they have?
- What are the methods of reporting on work done for you? Will they issue monthly activity reports? Conference reports, six- or 12-monthly reviews?
Ask too, for the names of some of the people from their client organisations with whom you may talk about the quality of the consultants' work. Now you are ready to reduce the short-list to possibly two or three.
Consultancy presentations
Advertising agencies are often selected on the basis of their pitch. That is, they are briefed on the product or service to be advertised and they are asked to come up with a creative theme or themes as well as a media programme.
Public relations consultants, however, can rarely if ever, present a detailed long-term communication programme on the basis of an initial briefing. This is because the communication problems to be solved are often exceedingly complex and require a need for research.
Do not expect detailed recommendations unless you are prepared to pay for them. This is because it takes time, as well as the knowledge and expertise of the consultancies, to prepare anything other than an outline of the way in which they would tackle your communications programme. It is important to explain in detail what you require.
Meeting the consultancies
Now that your short-list is down to, say, two or three, you are ready to meet the people who are likely to be working on your programme.
Ask to meet all of the people who will be handling your work. Allow plenty of time for presentations to you and for follow-up discussions. Let them tell you about their approach to answering your needs and about their experience. Let them give you case histories, what they did and how they did it.
Have a list of criteria against which each of the consultancies is to be judged. It is important to recognise that you should engage a public relations consultancy on its record and its match with you.
Before anything else you need to feel compatible and comfortable with the consultancy, its client list and its people. The detailed communication plan comes later.
The brief
If you want your short-listed consultancies to give you a more detailed programme, you need to give them a brief. Be prepared to pay for their submissions. After all, they are spending time and expertise to develop the proposals.
The usual practice is to provide the short-listed consultancies with a written brief of your organisation's needs, problems and potential opportunities.
Briefs can call for the launch of a new product, response to market changes, a new corporate identity or a strategy to prevent a takeover.
The timing for the brief is critical.
If you are planning to brief your advertising agency or any other consultant, then that is also the time to brief your public relations consultancy.
Academic and practical experience
Today's public relations consultants come from a wide range of disciplines including journalism, marketing, law, education, finance, business management and politics.
Many new members are coming into the industry with tertiary academic qualifications and are choosing to enhance their reputations by completing the Institute's accreditation examination, entitling them to use the initials APR.
The following is a list of areas in which public relations consultancies provide assistance. It isn't meant to be comprehensive, nor is it in any order of priority:
- Media relations
- Marketing of products, services and issues
- Employee relations
- Financial public relations
- Investor relations
- Issues management
- Crisis management
- Community relations
- Government relations
- Special events