Flickr Image: DailyPic

The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) has a new initiative to help PR professionals make the case for public relations and communicate with business executives more effectively. As part of this initiative, Todd Buchholz, former White House director of economic policy, commentator on Marketplace, and author, was invited to give Monday’s keynote at the 2009 PRSA International Conference. I attended his address, on behalf of BurrellesLuce, in which he helped the audience understand the state of the economy and presented ideas for recovery.

Don’t fudge numbers and use solid data to forecast.
Buchholz commented on the real estate crisis, noting how it could have been averted if the banks making the loans had done due diligence and properly reviewed the incomes of the mortgagees and if bank lenders had based loans on true forecasts not speculations.

Intellectual power of the people is the key to U.S. economic success.
Buchholz believes we need to improve our K-12 education. The U.S. is like the Jamaican bob sled team of the education Olympics. Everything works better with competition, so he thinks giving performance pay to good teachers is beneficial, enabling these teachers to continue teaching, instead of going into another industry.

There is good news about our current economic state.
We should take advantage of the discounted prices to purchase goods, stock, services, etc. For example, if you are planning a conference in two years, book the hotel now and lock in a good price.
Be patient.
It will take time to recover from our current jobless rate. We will come out, and PR can be a part of it.

How are you working to better understand business principles in order to effectively communicate to your executives? Do you have thoughts on the economy and its relation to PR and marketing?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Industry Events, Public Relations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.