Last year, a colleague of mine was working with a student to help her understand the differences between objectives, strategies and tactics for her first PR plan (an assignment for my principles of public relations class).
The student thought about it for a few minutes and then offered this analogy. Public relations planning is kind of like football:
The objective = to score.
The strategy = the plays the team uses on offense or defense to reach the objective.
The tactics = the individual players.
All three parts need to work together to achieve the goal – to be the best in the league.
My students in the same course are working on the objectives, strategies and tactics for a hypothetical plan for the local humane society. What tips would you offer to students working on their first PR Plan? What about planning is intuitive? What is not?
Photo by Adam Klepsteen, via stock.xhchg.
Comments
3 responses to “The Game Plan: Objectives, Strategies & Tactics”
I think it’s very important to put yourself in the situation. If you are doing PR for the local humane society with your goal being an increase in foster pet parents – ask yourself, what would convince you to become a foster pet parent? Ads? Newspaper articles? Blogs? Word of mouth? An event showing off cute puppies and kittens? You have to think like your audience in order to reach them. And if you can’t put yourself in their shoes, try to talk to someone you are targeting.
The other valuable aspect of the ‘football’ analogy is that it helps students understand how to create strategy, which I have found is the most difficult in terms of objectives, strategies and tactics because it is the most nebulous.
I use the football analogy and explain that just as in football you wouldn’t have the players (tactics) running randomly down the field or calling their own individual plays, you can’t just throw random tactics together and hope that they work. Players work together to create plays to help them score and hopefully ultimately win the game and tactics must work together to support the chosen strategy which in turn supports the objective and the ultimate goal. Strategy is essential in creating that framework for the tactics.
Awesome way to think about this and something I understand… I’m struggling as the only PR person at the small company to put together a plan and campaigns etc and be the only one to really know how to do it… I am finding that only a few months out of school I’m forgetting basic components of a plan and the info online is all over the place so this is great!