CPRS Strategic Planning 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A PR practitioner is building a five-year strategic communications plan. Which planning horizon challenge is most significant?
- Difficulty securing multi-year budgets
- Inability to predict technological and social changes (Correct answer)
- Lack of management interest beyond one year
- Regulatory restrictions on long-term commitments
Correct answer: Inability to predict technological and social changes
Long-horizon planning is complicated by the rapid pace of technological, social, and media change that makes specific predictions increasingly uncertain.
Question 2: Which approach to identifying target publics asks 'Who is affected by this issue AND has the power to affect us?'
- Demographic segmentation
- Psychographic profiling
- Situational theory of publics (Correct answer)
- Geographic clustering
Correct answer: Situational theory of publics
Grunig's situational theory of publics categorizes audiences by problem recognition, constraint recognition, and level of involvement, helping identify active vs. passive publics.
Question 3: A company has limited PR budget and must choose between national media outreach and deep community engagement in one city. This is an example of a(n):
- Measurement challenge
- Strategic trade-off decision (Correct answer)
- Tactical execution problem
- Research gap
Correct answer: Strategic trade-off decision
Strategic trade-offs occur when resource constraints require planners to choose between competing approaches, each with different reach and depth implications.
Question 4: When developing PR objectives, the 'relevant' criterion in SMART most closely means:
- The objective uses current communication channels
- The objective directly supports a business or organizational goal (Correct answer)
- The objective resonates with the target audience
- The objective is interesting to media outlets
Correct answer: The objective directly supports a business or organizational goal
Relevant PR objectives must align with and contribute to broader organizational or business goals, ensuring PR activities create real organizational value.
Question 5: Which term describes a PR strategy where the organization shares its perspective before journalists or critics frame the story negatively?
- Reactive containment
- Agenda setting
- Getting ahead of the story (Correct answer)
- Crisis inoculation
Correct answer: Getting ahead of the story
'Getting ahead of the story' is a proactive PR strategy where an organization releases information on its own terms to shape initial coverage before others define the narrative.
Question 6: A PR team disagrees on whether to use social media or traditional media for a campaign. The decision should ultimately be driven by:
- Which channel is most familiar to the PR team
- Where the target audience consumes information (Correct answer)
- Which channel is less expensive
- Which channel has higher overall reach
Correct answer: Where the target audience consumes information
Channel selection must be audience-driven; the most effective channel is where the intended stakeholders actually seek and receive information.
Question 7: In PR planning, 'positioning' refers to:
- Where paid advertisements are placed in media
- How the organization wants to be perceived relative to competitors or issues (Correct answer)
- The geographic markets targeted in a campaign
- The order in which messages are delivered
Correct answer: How the organization wants to be perceived relative to competitors or issues
Positioning defines the distinct place an organization or brand occupies in stakeholders' minds relative to alternatives, shaping all subsequent messaging.
CPRS Strategic Planning 4
A PR practitioner is building a five-year strategic communications plan.
Which planning horizon challenge is most significant?