| A Manager s Guide to PR Projects was conceived, gestated, and produced out of sheer frustration. Perhaps a more academic approach to this explanation would be to say that one university professor experienced considerable difficulty in acquiring appropriate materials to support a pedagogical approach involving student participation and hands-on experience. So she wrote the book herself. But I prefer a less cluttered way of writing and speaking.
For about six years I taught, among other things, a one-semester foundation course in public relations as a professional discipline for our first-year public relations majors, and its follow-up course, that focused primarily on an introduction to the strategic process of public relations planning. Although there is a wide variety of choice in the area of introductory textbooks, and each of them has a chapter or three on strategy, there is far less choice in the search for materials to accompany a first course on communication and public relations planning. There are some excellent communication planning textbooks that provide background and theory, and I use these, but I observed that my students were missing something.
Several years and several hundred student/client public relations plans later, I also found myself in the position of teaching our senior-level course in public relations management. A 4000-level course, it still lacked material of a practical nature for student reading and application. Of course we used James Grunig's "Excellence Study" as well as a variety of case study books over the years, but there was still something missing. Consequently, I set about developing the materials that would be useful for the students. A Manager s Guide to PR Projects was the result. |