When should you establish a Public Affairs function? Part I

Conclusions based on 4 case-studies

When is the timing right to formally establish an in-house Public Affairs function?

I get this question sometimes, and it is quite difficult to answer without making too many disclaimers. For me, the most important part is to understand why you are considering establishing the unit, and secondly what is the objective.

But to get a better understanding of why and how businesses do it, I have during the last 8 months collected data from 4 companies that - within the the last three years - decided to formally established a Public Affairs function. I have interviewed the PA leads of these 4 European companies specifically about their honest experiences a long the way, which - to get access - required that the companies were kept anonymous. I obliged to this requirement as the interesting part is not the names of the companies, but what we can learn and maybe extrapolate from them, to get closer to an answer to the question of this blogpost.

And I was a bit surprised by some of the motives and learnings to be honest…

What the data shows

Below in the matrix you will see a comparison of the 4 companies across 8 variables as well as some of my interpretations of these findings: