An interesting article on the Guardian Sustainable Business blog asks what would happen if PR were employed to play a more active role in building trust and effecting change. The author cites criticism of PR as a vehicle primarily concerned with “managing reputation or winning favour for past acts of philanthropy” and suggests that the discipline could instead play a more dynamic role “as an agent for change rather than to gloss up reputations.”

Which leaves me to wonder why so many practitioners seem to overlook the fact that public relations has always been as much about advising an organisation on what to do as it is about helping decide what to say. When we focus only on what is going out and not on what is going on then we do our clients and their audiences a disservice.

This is famously true of sustainability communications, hence the direction of the article. However I think it points to a deeper issue facing the way we perceive the role of communications in an organisation. Simply put, as a discipline we too often spend more time thinking about the rhetoric than the reality.

We see this all the time in the development of key message documents and other narrative materials, where we constantly think about what we want to say. But effective communication does not revolve around what is said, but what is received. Communication that does not put the needs and expectations of the audience first is so much hot air.

As PR practitioners, our role should be to help organisations view their actions from the other side of the table. The questions we should be asking are simple but effective in focussing attention on the behaviours needed to build trust;

Who are the audiences that drive our business? Scatter-gun communication is an ineffective way of building trust-based relationships. Instead we need to be a lot more exclusive in targeting our messages. There is an increasing expectation that communication will be personal and relevant to the individuals the organisation is trying to reach. And now more than ever we have the tools to meet those expectations.

What are the expectations or motivators of those audiences? If we don’t understand what drives our audiences to think or act as they do then we can never persuade them to think or act differently. The irony is that much of this insight often exists within the organisation – market research reports, customer profiles, CRM data etc. – but the information is not always shared with the PR function. And even more rarely shared with an outside agency.

Also the listening function is often overlooked as a key strategic tool. Conversations that once took place over dinner or in bars are now being broadcast globally, but it’s surprising how many organisations restrict conversation monitoring to the traditional media. If we don’t know what people are saying about us then how can we communicate effectively with them?

What is the organisation doing today that meets those expectations? This is where messaging should start. One of my mentors once defined communications strategy as “a conscious decision to emphasise one thing over another”  and this question helps define what we should be emphasising. The primary role of external public relations is to ensure that audiences receive the information they need to help them make informed decisions about the organisation. That means backing up assertions with independently verifiable fact and making sure that information is relevant to the specific audiences we are trying to reach.

What else should the organisation be doing to better meet those expectations? This is the part that is too often overlooked by PR practitioners but is arguably the most important element in building trust. Trusted organisations are responsive to the needs of their stakeholders. A client that I worked with a few years ago told me “We don’t do sustainability because it makes good commercial sense – it doesn’t. At best our sustainability initiatives are cost neutral. We do it because there is an expectation among our customers that we will be a sustainable company and they will punish us if we don’t meet those expectations.” The primary role of internal public relations is to ensure that the organisation understands the expectations of its stakeholders and what it needs to do to meet them.

In short, the responsibility of the PR practitioner is twofold: to represent the interests of the organisation before its stakeholders and to represent the interests of  the stakeholders before the organisation. Too often we focus more attention on the former rather than the latter.

Arguably, the reverse should be the case.