Learning PR lessons after Asia's tsunami

Our mission at the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management

We want to know how an experience like the tsunami shapes people's perception. A great deal of PR hypotheses exist and we want to document communication lessons learned from the disaster and apply our skills and knowledge to help PR companies in affected areas keep debt relief - or whatever issue they chose to focus on - in the news.

At the GA, we believe that in theory, two professionals from different countries can be tackling the same problem using the same theoretical framework, although largely because of context, they will choose different solutions.

The tsunami task force will involve PR leaders from every continent. It will analyze lessons from the handling of this and similar disasters, including the way that communication during and after the disaster period was handled in different societies and under different conditions. We aim to suggest how long-term issues such as debt relief can be kept at the forefront of the public agenda, so that poorer countries are better able to cope in such situations.

We hope that the results of the tsunami task force will show what communication was effective, and what wasn't. And because we will also analyze how the rest of the world perceived it was responding and communicating, we will have another point of view to test if a global theory of practice can be applied to public relations.

On a longer-term basis, members of the 60 partner organizations that make up the GA want to listen to their peers from the countries affected by the tsunami and determine if we can assist in advocating, through public relations efforts, a better place on the world stage for the countries devastated by this disaster. Perhaps then we will be in a position to say the world truly is a global village. Marshall McLuhan would be proud.

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