How to Transition from Agency to In-House PR

Quoted on this wiki

Every place a page here uses this source, in the order the words come in it.

1. Your internal stakeholders are your most important relationships. In-house communications success depends enormously on your relationships with the CEO, the CFO, the heads of business units, legal counsel, and HR. These people will shape what you can communicate, when, and how. Getting them to trust your counsel, to bring you into decisions early enough to influence the communications strategy rather than just execute the response, is the central challenge of in-house communications leadership. It is a different skill set from the journalist relationships and client management that define agency success. “Agency work involves client approvals.” You are a cost center, not a revenue generator. At an agency, your work directly relates to revenue — your accounts generate fees. In-house, communications is a support function, and you will spend your career making the case for its value to people who are ultimately focused on the revenue-generating parts of the business. The measurement challenge discussed elsewhere in this series is not academic — it is the daily reality of justifying your function's existence to CFOs and CEOs who were not trained to think about communications as a strategic asset.

   In Client-agency operating cadence