Public Relations for the Public Good

Preface

By Harold Burson

 

There’s a common misconception that public relations serves only commercial interests, mainly large corporations.

But looking back on the greatest social movements in American history, we learn that the most successful of them were achieved by passionate people who innately understood how to act and communicate in a manner that shaped public opinion and mobilized support for their causes.

Even though “public relations professionals” were not involved in many of these social upheavals—females seeking the right to vote, for example, or the abolition of slavery—their success depended on what we today would describe as the application of sound public relations principles. In effect, public relations is an applied social ...