After Business Process Outsourcing and Knowledge Process Outsourcing, are we ready for PR Process Outsourcing (PRPO) ?

PR agencies today are providing a variety of services to their clients today. These consist of providing consultation on the clients’ communications strategies and programmes, implementing various media and non-media related activities, training, creative writing, media monitoring, etc.

While the planning of these activities requires brain-work, there are a number of process-driven activities involved. Documents and reports need to be prepared. Faxes, emails, RSVPs, and couriering need to be taken care of. Somebody need to constantly monitor the media and make clips of relevant and important media stories. These clips needed to be scanned, faxed, emailed and later compiled into monthly reports.

Till now these processes were being taken care of by the younger staff in PR agencies. Often we learn that professionals, even though the younger staff are new trainees and fresh pass-outs of PR institutes, they don’t take handling such processes with lots of enthusiasm. They want to do some brain work, be creative, and start interacting with the media and clients’ sooner. While some feel that managing these day-to-day processes are integral to the growth of any professional, there is another school of thought that says with evolving technology and increasing sophistication and complexity of the PR profession, fresh recruits should be made to d the ‘thinking’ from day one. After all, the strength of a PR consultant lies in his/her ability to counsel the client.

To give an example, while earlier people need to know MS DOS to work on computers, nowadays there is hardly any need as it is the day of extra user-friendly Windows Vista already.

Maybe to cater to later thought-process that a new start-up called IndiaPRConnect is out to target and help the PR industry offload some of the day-to-day processes. The firm describes itself as a salutation to the PR fraternity and maintains that it is no competition to any agency. It says that its objective is to partner PR agencies and support them in the non-core and back-end PR processes so that PR agencies can concentrate on their key business - media and client relations.

PR agencies have always been using media monitoring services and press release distribution services. But in addition to providing these services, IndiaPRConnect will provide a variety of other services including PR collateral designing, media coverage measurement and media research, training, and organising seminars and training. It will also act as a job placement agency for the PR industry.

Will this work? I would say that it has got good chances. Many agencies would readily outsource media monitoring services to them, provided that they have a competitive service in the market. There are already dozens of media monitoring agencies in the market today that have been catering to PR agencies and IndiaPRConnect need to see that its services provide some value-adds over the existing ones. It might take some time for agencies to outsource their entire documentation processes and get used to this new offshoot of the PR industry. However, if some big agencies start using its services and see value in it, many others might follow.

For corporate houses, this might be a good alternative for expensive PR agencies in short-term project work like having a seminar or a press conference organised. There are many companies today that use PR agencies only for specific activities like organising a press conference, monitoring the media, conducting a media dip-stick research, develop some press kit designs, sending invites and RSVP, etc. If IndiaPRConnect is able to offer its services at a value lower than the established PR agencies, it might get business from corporates as well.

Is the industry ready?