Universitetinių aukštųjų mokyklų ryšiai su visuomene: sampratos raida ir ypatybės
PUBLIC RELATIONS IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS: DEVELOPMENT OF CONCEPTION AND ITS PECULIARITIES

Summary/Abstract: Higher education institutions as well as other organizations want to emphasize their distinctive competencies and values, to attract more prospective students and to become better known. Therefore these institutions have started to pay more attention toward public relations. However, public relations are a new subject in higher education area and these relations are not comprehensively developed as well as investigated. Therefore traditions, functions, principles of public relations in higher institutions are not clear. The process of public relations development in higher education institutions is in progress and the main principles of PR are taken from the private sector. Public relations in private sector are better developed (it started developing more than one hundred years ago and had strong traditions), but, higher education institutions cannot transfer all the principles of public relations from enterprises, because these organizations have different purposes. The state higher education institutions seek to be opened to the society and provide them with knowledge and etc. However, the enterprise’s purpose is to get profit. Therefore the authors of the article discuss the conceptions, development and peculiarities of PR in higher education institutions. The individual elements of public relations in higher education institutions are traditions, publics and departments, which are responsible for public relations. Traditions are important and unique attributes of higher education institutions. Public relations can strengthen and emphasize these elements, such as rich history, buildings, exceptional events and even outstanding graduates. The internal and external publics in higher education institutions are distinctive and very important, too. Unfortunately institutions concentrate on the relations with just one external public - media - and forget about others audiences. Therefore, public relations are not very well-balanced. Just regular communication with all the publics can warrant good public relations. The functions of public relations involve a lot of elements: from lobby till crisis management, therefore, the understanding of scientists how to divide these functions is different. The functions of PR could be divided according to the purpose of PR programs, according to the programs’ implementation stages and according to the tasks set by PR practitioners. The division of the functions and the consequent need for implementation of these functions are also presented in the paper. One of the purposes of PR is to help the organization to avoid problems. The biggest problems are named as crisis. The implementation of public relations in higher education institutions through the function of crisis management is also analyzed in the article. Crisis in organizations appear mostly because of internal and external reasons. The article proposes to analyze where crisis can appear, to prepare for them in advance and to make a crisis management

• Details
• Contents