As we are more than halfway through this Public Affairs myth-busting experiment, I thought we would use this weeks blog to take a deep-dive on a couple of the trends observed after the answers from more than 25 Public Affairs (PA) professionals here on the blog.
More specifically two questions we have asked the bloggers: Where is the PA function placed? And how many work in the PA team? Even though it is a very small base, the “half-time” stats are still quite interesting.
Where is the PA function placed?
This is a question center to quite a lot of debate and good arguments for the different setups.
As you can tell from graph there are the different setups represented which stresses how adaptable PA is to the specific organisational need.
Two observations stand out to me. One is how many PA teams who actually refer directly to the CEO. This is – in my view – very positive and a sign that PA holds a lot of legitimacy in the organization. The other observation surprising me a bit was that some PA teams actually are based under marketing (& communication) – and seem to work well.
As I have stated a few times there are many types of setups that can work, but I do believe that if you want the full potential and value of PA then it needs to be able to work independently and report direct to c-level. If you place it under e.g. marketing, this will affect how PA is perceived, what is initiated and what is not. In general there are of course also differences between industries and if the products/services are B2B or B2C – some industries are more complex, regulated or more in the public eye like finance, defense, or the chemical sector. These factors will affect the organisational setup for a PA unit and what makes sense.
The positive news is that PA can work very well in different organisational constellations as there are many examples of here on the blog. And again the base is very small, so it is only observations.
How big is the PA team?
The second question I have looked closer at is how big the PA teams are.
The results were somewhat as expected. In my book The Public Affairs Engine – which is based on more than 500 conversations with PA pros from 2016-2020 – the average PA team was between 4-5. So based on the blogs the picture is somewhat similar.
But I do think there is a common perception that the PA teams are very large armies, which is not confirmed by these observations. They are on the contrary often fairly small teams compared to other departments or functions.
Again this is of course a super small sample and not representative. And have in mind an organization can have people working on clearly defined PA activities without them belonging to the PA team or having a “PA title”.
It will be interesting to see how this picture looks when we cross the end of the year. Thanks for following this blog – the reception has been overwhelming!
The blog will now go on summer vacation and will be back again in August. Have a nice summer!
/ Anders Kopp