Public relations is widely misunderstood – sometimes reduced to media handling, crisis management, or spin. Sarah Waddington, Chief Executive of the PRCA, the world's largest professional body for public relations and communications, makes a different argument entirely: that PR is a strategic management discipline, integral to organisational success, and urgently needed in a fractured world where trust is at an all-time low.
In this episode, Sarah talks about what she found when she stepped into the CEO role — an organisation that had been through a challenging period and needed a unifying sense of direction. She shares how she crystallised and reoriented the PRCA's mission, and what it looks like to lead a vocal and diverse membership body through changing times.
That mission has two clear ambitions: to make the case for PR at the level it deserves, and to make PR a profession that is inclusive by default. Sarah discusses the PRCA’s commissioning of a new industry definition, bolstered by a CBI Economics impact study, that speaks to the economic and societal contribution of the profession in addition to its mechanics. Sarah also discusses the plan to bring together the industry's many diversity groups under one coordinated effort, to identify structural gaps, and start to close them.
The conversation also covers where PR sits relative to advertising and marketing, why reputation in the age of AI demands a more prominent role for PR, and how Sarah sees strategic communications as a force for tackling some of the most intractable social challenges of our time.
Supported by Norman Broadbent: https://www.normanbroadbent.com/
Sarah Waddington