Diversity in Public Relations by Heather Anderson
Understanding the importance of diversity is crucial to succeeding in public relations. Reaching out to a variety of groups, such as racial and cultural groups, is necessary in order to expand your organizations market. When gaining more exposure with more and more publics, organization's need to be constantly aware of how they come off to different publics. They need to treat them all equally in terms of focus and respect.
For example, Susan G. Komen for the Cure has a campaign called Circle of Promise devoted solely to how breast cancer affects African American women. A major issue that Komen needs to overcome is that African American women have a higher mortality rate than any other group. Which is why Komen felt the need to create the Circle of Promise campaign.
Another organization that has done a great job with diversity is Dove. Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty does a wonderful job of show diverse body types and ethnicities of women sending the message that all women are beautiful.
Being conscious of how messages can be perceived by different publics is needed to run successful campaigns and to avoid as many mistakes as possible, especially ones that could be potentially offensive.
1 comment:
Being an African-American woman, I can confirm the statistics regarding the stigma African-American women have in terms of breast cancer. This is my first time ever hearing about the Circle of Promise campaign, however, this is sounds very interesting and I applaud Komen for her efforts to tackle such as sensitive topic in the black community. In addition, I am familiar with the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. I think that businesses have to come to there senses and realize that everyone's skin, hair and other areas of beauty are different by race and ethnicity. At times, it is not what makes us, meaning women, different that seperates us but we have to search for simliarities; and that being that women are beautiful. I enjoyed reading this blog.
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