Plans to relaunch PRATT amid changing industry landcsape

PRATT’s Interim Steering Committee, led by the association’s former president and Managing Director of Reputation Management Caribbean, Lisa- Ann Joseph, is inviting interested persons to attend their latest meeting at Queen’s Hall, St Ann’s at 5 o’clock this afternoon (April 6).

“Our aim is to revive PRATT so that PR practitioners can network, get advice, get training, even eventually become certified by PRATT; that last is a medium to long-term goal. Having benefited from PRATT when I was a young practitioner, I know how important a role the association can play for PR professionals in TT today.”

Joseph, who first entered the PR field in the early 1990s, told Business Day that PR is about much more than organising an event or putting out a statement.

“Public Relations deals with the interaction between human beings - relating, communicating. In the past, our work was about ensuring that the organisation is communicating with its stakeholders. Now, it is about two-way communication and listening to your customer/stakeholders because no brand, no company worth its salt, can communicate one-way, especially not in this day of social media.”

“If you don’t listen to your customers or your stakeholders, then why are you in existence? So a true PR practitioner has to understand that their role and function is to ensure that the organisation communicates but also for the organisation to listen to its stakeholders, to ensure that there is proper two-way communication.”

Asked how she became involved in relaunching PRATT, Joseph recalled being in a Chicago hotel late one night in June 2016 when a male colleague posted on Facebook about a PRATT event from several years ago.

“He shared it as a joke, saying ‘Oh my God, where is PRATT? Look at memories.’ Then we got a plethora of posts from people, saying ‘Yes, PRATT has to come back. It just needs to be done. We need this, all these things are happening’. But nobody was stepping up to throw their hat in the ring, so I said, you know what? I’m going to bring it back together because somebody has to do it instead of just talking about it, and I convened a meeting for two weeks from that date with all of those who had commented.”

Around that same time, Joseph was getting requests from “a lot of young PR practitioners” who wanted guidance from a seasoned professional. She said this, combined with the Facebook post, was what motivated her to become Chairman of the Interim Steering Committee, whose objective is to successfully relaunch PRATT.

In the nine months since, the committee has held meetings on a regular basis and conducted brainstorming sessions where they reviewed PRATT’s constitution and membership criteria, given the many changes that have taken place since the association was first formed.

“We made amendments to both, which will have to be ratified by the first executive. There was some jargon in the constitution that needed to be updated but a lot of the work dealt with the types of members because the PR practitioner then and now is very different.”

Joseph explained that “the profession of PR has expanded so much that in some areas it’s not even called Public Relations. It’s called reputation management, branding, public affairs, corporate communications, corporate social responsibility, events management, et cetera. That’s the kind of work we had to do in terms of who can become a member of PRATT because how it was described then and how it is now, is quite different. So we did a lot of work on that to ensure the constitution and membership criteria encompass the type of practitioner operating in the landscape today.”

Looking ahead to the nomination of candidates for PRATT’s upcoming election, Joseph made it clear that she has no intentions of running for a post on the new executive.