R is for Research. The First Step in the ROPES Process.

From my freshman year in the Manship School I have heard the numerous stories about public relations campaigns. Some stories were good and others made me a little worried about taking the class. Now that I am in campaigns, I have realized that there is no way to really prepare for this class. Everyone’s experience is different depending on the group and the client. Now that I am about a month into campaigns, it is really starting to pick up speed.

Last week my group and I chose a logo for our campaign team. We chose the name Prelude Public Relations for our “firm.” Below is our logo. We chose the name Prelude Public Relations because we thought that campaigns and this project are preludes to our future as public relations practitioners.

After coming up with the name for our firm, the next step was to create a research report for our campaign. Throughout my time in the Manship School the ROPES process has been taught in numerous classes. When creating an outline, we decided that following the steps of the ROPES process was the best idea for developing our research reports. The first step was compiling research about our client, Louisiana Delta Service Corps. This type of research is known as secondary research. The main type of information that was gathered was background information and the internal structure of the organization. The next step was to do a situational analysis and establish the primary problem we were trying to help Louisiana Delta Service Corps fix. After completing this research, we looked into the target audience for Louisiana Delta Service Corps. Once these steps in the research process were completed we began our own primary research.

The main goal of our primary research was to establish the level of knowledge and awareness the target audience had about Louisiana Delta Service Corps. We developed a survey using SurveyMonkey to obtain information about our target audience’s level of awareness.

I really enjoyed working on the research report. I personally have never created one before so I am glad to now have this experience to take into the work force.

Research is such a crucial part of a public relations campaign. I did not realize until we were outlining the research report how much research we had already done, especially background research on Louisiana Delta Service Corps and AmeriCorps.

My group and I have already done some work on the O in ROPES, objectives, and hope to begin working on the programming element of the ROPES process very soon.

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