181113 ALR Remarks to Tonya Taylor’s Wheaton College Comms Class (adapted from 2000 CCCU Plenary Remarks)

I. Introduction

· My Agency colleague, Kristin Cole, and I are honored to be with you tonight.

· And, we’re grateful to Professor Taylor for her invitation to share our communications experience your Crisis PR/Reputations Management class, for which tonight’s focus in “Crisis Identification.”

Personal

· I am a 1976 Graduate of Wheaton College.

· I, personally, will be forever grateful for my Christian Liberal Arts education.

· With the hindsight of my own personal experience in the ivy halls, where I crammed four years into five, I want to challenge you to attend every class, commit your spare hours to the library, shun the opposite sex, pursue extra credit, and think seriously about your future.

· Because, I didn’t do any of that, and there is no telling how far I could have gone if I had.

· As one who double-majored in Biology and Economics, but spent more than four decades as a “PR Guy,” I am the poster child for a liberal arts education…

· Furthermore, I grew up in Wheaton, and am one of the few people you will meet who went farther to grade school, now Jinx Hall, than college. They had to raze my boyhood home in order to build the Billy Graham Center, which also houses the Grad School, where my father taught New Testament.

· Ironically, for more than 33 years, I had the opportunity to handle media and public relations for Dr. Billy Graham -- personally, for his crusades and corporately for the BGEA. It has been a privilege to have a small part in the ministry of one of God’s great servants.

· But that was not something I planned, rather it was due to the sovereignty and providence of God. While most of my classmates were graduating “Magna cum Laude,” I graduated “Laude How Come.” But I have been suiting up and showing up ever since, and leave the rest to the Lord.

· Having a professional involvement in ministry – where the product is changed lives -- has been very fulfilling to me. While we have to be even more professional than our secular counterparts to overcome stereotypes, I see our role as every bit as much ministry as anything else our clients do, as we are able to help extend the influence of Christian leaders such as Dr. Graham, and extend the impact of their organizations.

Secular Experience

· Prior to working in the religious arena for the past 38 years, I cut my teeth on the hard edges of corporate and agency national consumer public relations – first on the General Motors public relations staff, where I traveled across the country doing high school assembly presentations, and representing the corporation in the media.

I left GM for New York, where I worked for the Creamer, Dickson, Basford Agency, which was then the eighth largest PR firm in the country. Among other responsibilities, I handled the media positioning for Joe DiMaggio.

In 1981, I went from representing a sports icon to a faith icon, evangelist Billy Graham. That led to a niche at the intersection of faith and culture, and now nearly 25 years ago, my wife and I took what she calls a “Bungee Jump for God,” and we started our own eponymously named firm at the intersection of faith and culture.

We help clients tell their stories in the context of traditional news values that media need in order to communicate with their audiences.

Sometimes our role is pro-active, often reactive – increasingly involves crisis communications or reputation management.

Confessions

· Tonight, I want to provide comments and insights from a fellow Christian public relations practitioner and counselor on how I integrate my private and professional lives.

· That involves a confession: I don’t integrate my personal and professional lives, they integrate me. My professional life has fed my faith and personal life, and my personal faith informs my profession. And that, along with family, is what holds me together.

· While in Washington for the National Prayer Breakfast, I heard Jack Perkins, veteran PBS broadcaster make a startling statement for a newsman. He started his remarks by confessing, “I don’t know anything.”

I realized the same is true for me, “I don’t know anything about Media and Public Relations.” Everything I have ever learned about PR, I learned from three mentors early in my career, and subsequently from my clients.

As I began my career in religious public relations in 1981 at the age of 28, I was already the devoted disciple of three PR professionals – none of them Christians – but many teachers in our lives will not be. And in every case, it was a privilege to learn what God has on our syllabi.

· First, a woman from Detroit who trained me on the road for GM, from whom I learned media liaison. She was bold, brazen and tenacious, with a confidence in herself and her product that won over the most case-hardened media person.

· Secondly, a gentleman for whom I worked in the GM LA Zone PR office who taught me how to write. He was an old newspaper veteran, who to this day probably still uses an upright Smith Corona typewriter, but could write a news story faster than anybody I’d ever seen.

· And finally, my supervisor at the New York Agency, who taught me how to schmooze.

· PR is caught, not taught. Hopefully you have had or will have someone in your career who can take you under their wing and mentor some of the tricks of the trade for you.

· At the same time, I hope that you develop a mentoring perspective and are able to replicate yourself in your staff or others coming up the ranks behind you.

· As far as what I learned from clients, being a PR counselor is actually not much different than being a psychologist. While our clients don’t lie on a couch, often our job in helping them to solve a problem is not to tell them the answer or what to do, but to ask the right questions. Usually, they end up figuring it out themselves, and enlighten me in the process.

I. OUR MISSION

· Paradigm shifts in the media and our market require a new understanding of our mission as practitioners.

· Several years ago, “PR Week,” one of the top industry trade publications did a story titled, “When Your Client is God.”

In addition to a lengthy round-up story, the magazine listed me on the cover with the quote of the week, saying, “…I’m aware that I’m representing the Kingdom of God as well as my clients.”

· Our job is to extend the influence of Mr. Graham (and other Christian leaders) and the impact of their ministries to a broadened group of target audiences, with minimal demands on their time.

· Whenever possible, we try to speak to reporters as well, to let them know the reality of the Gospel in our own lives.

Ø Sometimes our role is reactive

Ø Some times it is pro-active.

Ø Occasionally, we kick into damage control or crisis PR as the need arises.

Perhaps you are not aware that crisis PR is first mentioned in the Bible, practiced during the time of Moses.

· MOSES JOKE:

Ø Engineer: Build a bridge – six months

Ø Lawyer: -- Lease fishing boats – six weeks

Ø PR Man: If it works I can guarantee you two pages in the Old Testament

II. OUR MISSION

· Paradigm shifts in the media and our market require a new understanding of our mission as practitioners.

· Two weeks ago, “PR Week,” one of the top industry trade publications did a story titled, “When Your Client is God.”

In addition to a lengthy round-up story, the magazine listed me on the cover with the quote of the week, saying, “…I’m aware that I’m representing the Kingdom of God as well as my clients.”

· Years ago, I received a letter from John Siegenthaler, former editorial page editor of USA Today. He wrote:

“There is a sense that journalists simply are not interested in religion as an ongoing day-to-day news story. Sure, if there is controversy over abortion, women in the clergy, gay marriages being sanctioned by the church, prayer in the schools, nativity scenes in pubic places, or factional disputes in denominations, the news media is ready to deal with religion as a story.

“But there are millions of people who go to church with the same regularity that they go to work or school. There are people who give to the church with the same fidelity that they pay their taxes. Some denominations report attendance and giving at record highs. Still, the press will not cover the church in the same routine as the way it covers business or education or government. Those in the church do not understand why.”

· The idea is not to reduce religion to yet another special interest group in the public arena competing against other groups. What we need is a greater understanding of the obvious and subtle ways in which religion informs and affects our public and personal lives.

· According to Harold Burson, founder of Burson-Marsteller:

“Public relations involves advancing information in the public forum for the purpose of contributing to public opinion.”

We need to reorient our thinking away from merely focusing on publicity in terms of pounds of press clippings. Rather, it is the extent to which you are able to influence public opinion for your organization or cause.

Public relations is the goal, various communication techniques are the tools, but public opinion is the strategy, the lever, the means.

V. WHAT MATTERS MOST

· Several Years ago “Time” magazine had a back page essay by Roger Rosenblatt entitled “What Should We Lead With”:

“Journalists put the question impractical terms: What should we lead with? The rest of the population asks more generally: What Matters Most? They come to the same puzzle: Survey events in a given period of time and try to come up with the single moment, the headline, by which the world may be characterized, stopped in its spin.

What should we lead with” What matters most? What we confront in making such choices is not the events alone, but ourselves; and it is ourselves we are not able to place in order. The question is not what the press decrees in this weeks news. The question is us. What should we lead with? What Matters most?”

· What matters most to you? In a society that places a great deal of emphasis on business and profession, are you known more for what you do than for who you are?

· What matters most to you as a person and a professional? If a reporter were to write a story about your life, what would be the lead?