Getting the Most from Your Agency Partnership

View the Relationship as a Partnership
Make sure you are available for the media interviews and regularly scheduled meetings with your PR team. Return your PR professional's phone calls and emails, and approve materials in a timely manner. Honesty and trust are the first steps to a positive agency/client relationship. Do the things you have agreed to do. Your PR team will coordinate, consult, train and coach, as well as plot, plan and pitch in the background, but in the end, expect your company's story to bask in the limelight.

Show & Tell
No one knows your business like you know your business. Provide your PR professional with vital statistics of your organization, information about your key personnel, your history (the good, the bad and the ugly), your current philosophy, priorities and goals. Share with your PR firm your excitement about the business and the industry so that they may convey that to the world.

Make a Liaison
Assign one specific PR contact at your company who will be there as a liaison to your PR team to ensure things get done in a timely manner. Assign him/her as the main contact through whom all information is obtained and processed. This will be the most timely and cost-effective way to work.

Don't Hold Back
Tell your PR professionals everything they need to know to get the job done (even the skeletons in the corporate closet and other vulnerabilities). Your PR liaison should inform your PR team about any company news and activities. You may sometimes think that PR opportunities are negligible; yet a good PR professional often can find an angle or opportunity in something you may think insignificant.

Hold Your PR Team Accountable
PR is not a science. Not everything works. Agencies are often at the mercy of cynical editors, a fickle public or a stronger news story. So, be prepared for plans to occasionally go awry, but insist on knowing why.

Understand Your Professional's Contract with the Media
In PR, getting your message across sometimes needs to be done subtly. PR professionals view their role as twofold: to achieve objectives and results for their clients AND to be a genuine news resource to the media. It is your PR professional's responsibility to find out what specific details each reporter wants and considers newsworthy and to craft the message accordingly. Give your PR professional the freedom to develop angles they think will work and their efforts may result in the kind of publicity you dream about. Trust your PR team's advice about how to handle specific media situations. Don't ever ask your PR professional to use advertising contracts as a 'carrot' or threat in exchange for editorial placement. You'll breach your PR professional's ethical contract with the media and run the risk of fracturing important relationships.

Be Responsive
The media work, usually, under intense pressure and horrific deadlines. The quicker you respond to efforts to arrange interviews, the better your chance of achieving results, and building a positive relationship with an editor.