Donnalyn Pompper received NCA’s 2015 PRIDE Book Award for her recent book. Photo courtesy of Donnalyn Pompper.
Dr. Donnalyn Pompper, associate professor in the Department of Strategic Communication received this year’s National Communication Association PRIDE Book Award from the Public Relations Division for her book, Corporate Social Responsibility, Sustainability and Public Relations: Negotiating Multiple Complex Challenges.
Pompper received the award on November 20 at the NCA conference in Las Vegas. Her previous book, Practical and Theoretical Implications of Successfully Doing Difference in Organizations also won the top 2014 Book Award from NCA’s Organizational Communication Division.
“Winning top awards two years straight for two separate books on completely different topics from both the Organizational Communication and the Public Relations divisions is an honor few academics achieve in a lifetime,” she said. “I am humbled by recognition of my PRD peers at NCA for its highest award.”
Pompper’s book addresses ethical considerations in public relations and encourages practitioners to serve as internal activists. She notes that ideally, organizations should communicate with all stakeholders, and also listen to what stakeholders have to say. “Public relations is so much more than publicity,” she said. “It’s building mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their stakeholders. Part of that function is to act as an activist and to help organizations to do the right thing for people, planet and profit.”
But the field, she said, has gotten a bad reputation. She argued that practitioners could change that reputation by asking themselves if they play a role in perpetuating these perceptions and if they are acting responsibly.
Ignoring such questions can lead to public relation crises. In her book, Pompper describes how Nestle’s Kit Kat candy contained palm oil sourced from the Amazon rainforest, where suppliers chopped down trees to harvest the oil, but also killed native orangutan populations in the process. Greenpeace then launched a negative social media campaign that exposed Nestle’s relationships with palm oil suppliers.
Pompper interviewed a Nestle executive who said the Swiss company learned its lesson to take activists seriously the hard way.
“Organizations are too willing to talk about doing good when they continue to do plenty of damaging things to people and the planet,” she said. “Just getting media play for publicity’s sake is not the same as being authentic and socially responsible.”
Pompper emphasized that public relations professionals need a seat at the management table so they could steer organizations toward ethical and socially responsible practices. She believes organizations need to think about the long-term. “An organization should leave its geography the same or better than it was when they got there,” she said. “If what you’re manufacturing or providing is going to negatively impact future generations, that’s not being responsible. Thinking long-term is being sustainable and responsible.”
She offered the company Interface, which reuses carpet tiles to minimize its carbon footprint, as an example. “You can’t buy the positive reaction Interface has received among stakeholders. [It’s] actually changing the way it does business. They aren’t ashamed to tell their story and as consumers, we’re fascinated by it.”
Pompper believes a key to promoting public relation practitioners as internal activists lies in teaching students the fundamentals of ethics. Public relations, she said, can play a larger role in the field of communication if practitioners take the field in new directions through ethical practices.
Pompper said practitioners could enhance their credibility by earning the Accreditation in Public Relations credential from the Public Relations Society after a few years of experience in the industry.