Creativity in public relations

This year's big challenge for public relations and communication professionals seems to be creativity, in particular, our ability with visual communication. 

Having spent some time this month working with practitioners on developing their creativity, the problem isn't a lack of ideas, vision or inspiration. The problem is that the hugely creative mind of the practitioner isn't generally acknowledged (or resourced) by their leaders and co-workers.

Yet creativity is at the heart of what we do. We develop creative approaches to building and sustaining the relationships organisations need to keep their licence to operate. We develop and implement creative forms of communication - either written, visual, oral or experiential. We develop creative research solutions to help our organisations truly understand their communities and stakeholders as well as the hardest creative task - developing crisis scenarios, examining issues and risks so that potential problems are addressed and a crisis is averted. 

Imagining the unthinkable isn't a fun occupation but there is significant creativity involved, with practitioners able to address and discover solutions to problems organisations didn't know they had.

The biggest challenge isn't the ability to be creative in public relations. The biggest challenge is helping organisations to understand that practitioners are not 'order takers' there simply to 'send out stuff'. For organisations that work that way it's rather like having a top of the range Mercedes available but driving it like it is an ancient jalopy.

Helping organisations develop an understanding of our purpose and value is a priority task we should, as a profession,  collectively bend our minds towards.