The definition of public relations is watching trends, talking to organization leaders and creating planned programs that will help a situation. One planned program of action that I will discuss with you today is called framing.
What is framing? According to The Psychology of Climate Change Communication, "framing is the setting of an issue within an appropriate context to achieve a desired interpretation or perspective;" (Shome and Marx p.6). This is very important to public relations professionals because we are constantly pushing different messages to several different audiences. You must be able to convince your audience to adapt a desired perspective of the message you are attempting to relay.
Some benefits of framing a message are it organizes central ideas on an issue, helps communicate why an issue might be a problem and helps frams condense a message into useful communication "short cuts" such as slogans and images (Shome and Marx, p.6).
The first step in framing is to evaluate your audience and find out how they view a subject before you approach them with your message. Speaking to vegans about increasing their use of a meat-based product would not be smart. Next, consider your audience's subcultures. This means paying attention to the race, ethnicity, class, age, gender and specific sets of beliefs of people in groups. You should ask yourself if the majority belongs to the same group in the audience. The last step in framing is to prepare several different frames and messages ahead of time. All of your angles should tie into your big topic. You don't want to get lost in so many subheadings that the audience will lose sight of the big picture (Shone and Marx, p.7).
If you would like to read some cases of how framing affects people, log onto: http://psp.sagepub.com/content/22/3/257.abstract to see what scientists and psychologists have to say about research on framing.
Framing is one of the most important and effective programs of action that we public relations practitioners have. You could not stress enough the importance of knowing your audience when utilizing this tool. I liked the example of how "speaking to vegans about increasing a meat-based product would not be smart."
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