Public Relations
Last revised 9/21/2026

Public Relations

How organisations earn, defend, and sometimes lose public trust

This course covers how organisations manage reputation through planned, two-way communication: research and campaign planning, media relations, crisis response, audience segmentation, and the ethics of persuasion. We keep the ground the textbook covers and the rigour it insists on, drop the padding that exists only to fill a semester, and reorganise the material into short, self-contained pieces you can read one at a time. You finish able to plan a campaign, brief a newsroom, and hold a reputation together when an incident goes public.

PrimerField Guide
Earn11CreditsinCommunication
9Modules63Sessions

Modules in this Collection’s System

Coming soon

What Public Relations Is, and How It Grew

Defines the discipline, separates it from neighbouring fields, and traces how it became a profession.

7Sessions
Coming soon

Ethics, Standards, and Where the Work Happens

How professional bodies police the field, and how in-house teams and agencies are organised and paid.

7Sessions
Coming soon

Evidence First: Research and Campaign Planning

The research methods that come before a campaign, and the eight parts every plan has to contain.

7Sessions
Coming soon

Communication That Lands, and How to Prove It

How audiences receive, accept and act on messages, plus the measures that show whether they did.

7Sessions
Coming soon

Opinion, Persuasion, and the Management of Conflict

How opinion forms, where persuasion works and fails, and how a reputation is held through a crisis.

7Sessions
Coming soon

The Audiences You Address and the Law You Answer To

Segmenting a multicultural public, and the libel, privacy, copyright and regulatory limits on the work.

7Sessions
Coming soon

Channels: Digital First, Then Print

Websites, social platforms and mobile content, then the print toolkit from news release to news conference.

7Sessions
Coming soon

Broadcast, Events, and the Corporate Voice

Radio and television placement, event logistics, and communication with customers, employees and investors.

7Sessions
Coming soon

Public Relations Across Sectors

Entertainment, sport, tourism, government, international work, and the non-profit, health and education sectors.

7Sessions
Coming soon

What You'll Walk Away With

  • 1planning template for the eight elements of a public relations programme, from situation analysis through to evaluation.
  • 2contingency framework for placing a dispute on the continuum and choosing a response stance before positions harden.
  • 3segmentation habit that fixes ethnicity, age, gender and lifestyle audiences before any message is drafted.
  • 4media relations techniques for writing releases, assembling kits, pitching desks and preparing interviewees.
  • 5measurement ladder that climbs from production outputs to exposure, awareness, attitude and action.

You'll Have Answers To

  • ?If reputation is the asset, whose behaviour actually has to change for a campaign to work?
  • ?When does persuasion stop being persuasion, and who is entitled to decide?
  • ?Why do organisations that planned for trouble survive it better than those that improvised?
  • ?What does a newsroom want that a press release usually fails to give it?
  • ?How do you measure a relationship rather than a mention?

Critical Concepts Explored

reputation managementtwo-way communicationprogramme planningcontingency continuumissues managementcrisis communicationaudience segmentationmedia relationspersuasion ethicsevaluation ladder
Editor's Note
A method-first introduction to public relations practice.

Most introductions to public relations stack up case studies without a method. This collection keeps the method in front: research first, then planning, then channels, then measurement, with ethics running through the middle. It reads in short pieces and still holds together as one course.

Editor's Brief
Who it's for
Someone teaching themselves public relations outside a degree, who wants the practitioner's toolkit rather than course technique.
What stands out
A twenty-one chapter textbook compressed into sixty-three self-contained reads, so a full campaign plan can be understood in one sitting instead of after eight weeks of assigned reading.
Read if
Read it if you have watched a reputation collapse in real time and wanted the professional playbook that should have been running beforehand.
Gold Quotes
A reputation is the accumulated record of what an organisation did, not a message it can broadcast into existence.

Publicity can make a good record travel further, and it can buy a little time when the record is bad. What it cannot do is rewrite the record. Practitioners who forget this end up defending claims instead of managing behaviour.

About the Curator
NNano College

Nano College takes the standard university textbook for a course and turns it into short, self-contained pieces you can actually finish. We keep the ground the textbook covers and the rigour it insists on; what we leave out is the padding that only exists to fill a semester.

Public Relations | LearningFirst